The Means procedure is a powerful tool for description and analysis. It enables you to classify observations into broadly or narrowly defined groups and obtain a wealth of descriptive information about them. As a first step in the analysis of sample means, you can estimate the strength of linear and nonlinear association between a dependent variable and a grouping variable. This can serve as a precursor to more complex modeling techniques, such as analysis of variance and linear or nonlinear regression.

- The Summarize and OLAP Cubes procedures provide similar functionality but by default display different statistics and have different table layouts. The Summarize procedure additionally provides the ability to display individual case listings.
- The Explore procedure provides additional statistics and plots for scale variables within the categories of a single grouping variable at a time.
- The One-Way ANOVA procedure provides homogeneity-of-variance tests for determining whether that ANOVA assumption is met and alternative statistics that are robust to unequal variances across the groups of the factor variable. You can also specify post hoc tests to determine which groups differ.