Thanks Pat,
After you said that you would approach such a project differently again,
I don't think I'll ask you for your STR file but thanks for the offer.
Your comment about storing each question in it's own record in a panel
subordinate to the main questionnaire control panel is also useful.
Thanks again,
Michael
Patrick Riley wrote:
Michael, I did one survey project in DataPerfect. It worked out well in
the end as I was able to do very sophisticated cross tabulations by
various demographic components with ease. My client (an $8 billion
multi-national company) was very impressed.
A word of caution. DataPerfect supports only 255 report variables
which I used to store tabulations. As the survey form progressed,
I ran out of available variables. I got around this by storing two
tabulation results in each variable by multiplying one of the tabs
by 1,000,000 which effectively stored it in the high end of the RV.
When printing the results, I parsed it out of the high end of the
RV by dividing by 1,000,000 and discarding the remainder. To
get the low end tabulation out, I converted the numeric RV to a
string and, extracted the low end, and converted that back to a
number.
If I was doing this again, I'd store each question in it's own record
in a panel subordinate to the main questionnaire control panel. This
would eliminate problems with the number of available RVs and allow
you to create much longer surveys.
My questionnaire featured all of your question types plus several more
(rating something on a scale of 0 to 10, pick up to x choices from a
larger list of choices, or ranking a list of items in your order of
preference). Comments were allowed on many of the questions. The
DataPerfect output program allowed me to print the comments grouped
for review. On cross tabulations, I was able to print just the comments
that pertained to the associated demographic.
I created the actual survey document as a Web based form and
imported the results into DataPerfect. This worked great as I didn't
have any input efforts (which would have been substantial with the
large number of comments ... some of them quite lengthy). The Web
based form enabled me to use a combination of input form features
(radio buttons and check boxes) coupled with JavaScript verifications
to only accept valid input. This forced the input data to be completely
compliant eliminating any error handling in the DataPerfect application.
I still have this application in my possession. I did this project about
7 or 8 years ago so I don't remember much about it but I could send
you the STR file if you'd like. Frankly, if I was doing this again, I
wouldn't want my old application as it would certainly be difficult to
understand and modify. I'd, instead, start from scratch using the two
level approach I described above. If you would like the STR file, feel
free to call or E-mail.
Hope this helps.
Pat Riley
505-797-9072
At 02:35 AM 11/27/2006, you wrote:
Background:
Our village has recently taken part in a questionnaire/survey
whereby everyone filled in a paper form which is now being
transferred to computer file. The software provided by our local
authority (Council) is not particularly good: you have to go on line
for it to build a "Project List" of surveys done for other villages
before selecting & downloading the one for us - it does this /every
/time you want to transfer data from paper to file. The
"Questionnaire" part then loads but is not very user friendly, not
allowing you to go back to previous questions without loosing data
back to that point . . . . I could go on. Once data has been
transferred to files for the session, it must be uploaded but the
process of building a Project List etc.. occurs again first - all
extremely slow & frustrating.
In a moment of frustration/weakness, I did say to the chap running
the project for the village (he did have a good head of hair before
it all started!) that it would be fairly straight forward to design a
database that would do all that is required so much easier. Luckily
for me, I'm too late this time as the project is well under way but
may be repeated in a couple of years time.
So my question is has anyone designed a DataPerfect database for
questionnaires/surveys? It seems to me that that it should be fairly
straight forward but maybe laborious. There questions fall into four
categories:
Simple Yes/No responses,
Multiple choice options whereby only one of a number of options
must be chosen,
Multiple choice options whereby none, one, some or all of a
number of options must be chosen.
A box allowing comments to be written.
The first and last are easy, I'm not sure of the best way to achieve
the other two.
The other problem is the size of the questionnaire. There are just
under 200 questions which would be too many for a single panel,
although they are divided into sections such as Transport,
Environment etc... I had a thought of using a panel for each section
with a master Table of Contents Panel with links to all other panels
a bit like an table of contents linking to the relevant pages of a
book and maybe links from each panel to previous & next panels.
This is all thankfully a way off yet but any thoughts or ideas would
be welcomed.
Michael
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