You can select observations in a data table by clicking the row heading on the left side of the data table. You can drag down or up to select contiguous observations. You can click while holding down the CTRL key to select new observations without losing the ones already selected. Figure 4.5 shows selected observations.
Note: Highlighting a range of cells in the data table does not select the observations. The section Adding and Editing Observations in Chapter 3: Creating and Editing Data, lists operations that you can perform on a range of cells.
The four cells in the upper left corner of the data table are different from the other row headings, as described in the following list:
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Right-click in any of the four cells to display the menu. The menu is described in the section The Observations Menu. Consequently, this is a safe place to right-click when you want to change properties of the selected observations, but no selected observations are currently visible.
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Click in the upper left or lower right cell to deselect all observations and variables.
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Click in the upper right cell to deselect all observations and select all variables.
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Click in the lower left cell to deselect all variables and select all observations.
If no observations are selected, the lower left cell displays the total number of observations in the data table. If observations are selected, the lower left cell displays (in brackets) the number of selected observations.
If no variables are selected, the upper right cell displays the total number of variables in the data table. If variables are selected, the upper right cell displays (in brackets) the number of selected variables.
Figure 4.6 illustrates two possibilities. The left portion of the figure indicates a data table that has 2,322 selected observations; none of the 36 variables are selected. The right portion of the figure indicates that 6 variables are selected, but none of the 6,188 observations are selected.
