You may see a message about Unicode Mode when opening SPSS version 21 or newer.
From version 21 of SPSS, Unicode is used as the default mode for new files and you should choose to Use Unicode encoding unless you need to produce data files compatible with versions of SPSS older than 16.
Producing data files compatible with old versions of SPSS
Data files saved in Unicode cannot be read by versions of SPSS earlier than 16. If you need to produce a data file that can be opened in an older version:
More information is available on the IBM website:
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