Sorry - I know this is very basic, I'm a relatively novice.

If I want to manipulate a variable that is a word into a number, how do I do it? I've been able to answer most of my Stats questions using online tutorials thus far, but I haven't been able to successfully do this.

As an example, let's say I have a variable called letter. I have two options for the variable letter, "alpha" and "beta." I want to change alpha to 1 and beta to 2. I think it's some variation of destring, but I can't get the syntax right. I've had to do this in the past with small data sets and simply manually manipulated the data sheet, but I have larger data set for which manual manipulation would be cumbersome.

Thanks!