Short option naming

Andi — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 12:25:23 +0000

When browsing responses in grid view, each option in a multi-select receives its own column with either a ‘1′ or a ‘0′ to indicate whether the option was selected. Previously, the naming convention used was QUESTION-NAME_OPTION-LABEL. Although this naming convention was certainly very descriptive, you can end up with really long column headings. Whilst there is no limitation on column heading length in Mobile Researcher, when importing datasets into other applications, such as Microsoft Access, variable (column heading) names of more than 64 characters may be truncated leading to duplicate variable names.

With this new feature, you may optionally elect to use a short naming convention whereby each option in a multi-select question response is identified by QUESTION-NAME_OPTION-VALUE instead of QUESTION-NAME_OPTION-LABEL. This results in significantly shorter, but still unique column headings.

To use this feature, simply tick the box next to “Short Naming Option” when generating a result set from the Analytics tab.

Excel exports of more than 256 columns now supported

Andi — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 09:47:17 +0000

When exporting data from your Research Console, each question receives a column in the generated Excel file in addition to the automatically populated fields such as start and end time. In addition, multi-select questions (where more than one option is allowed to be selected) have their options split into columns with a ‘1′ or a ‘0′ indicating if the options was selected or not. With longer surveys and surveys with multi-select questions, the number of columns can quickly add up to more than 256 columns.

A limitation of Microsoft Excel 2003 is that it can’t support worksheets containing more than 256 columns. With this new feature, when this occurs, your exported workbook will automatically be split into multiple worksheets to compensate for this limitation. The system will create as many worksheets (parts) as necessary to keep the number of columns to under 256 in each. It will also ensure that splits only occur on question boundaries (i.e. a multi-select question won’t be split across two worksheets).

In each worksheet, the first two columns will be duplicated: Response ID and Fieldworker. This will allow you to follow a single response easily from one part to another.

We hope this new feature helps you in managing long surveys.

Mobenzi Community » 28.03.2009 release

Short option naming

Excel exports of more than 256 columns now supported