IN THIS ISSUE:

SurveyWriter Adds Joe Williams to Executive Team
Joe Williams, a long-time fixture in Chicago's Advertising and Communications community, has been tapped to head up SurveyWriter's Media Development division. more

Double-Ended Rating Question Type Now Available
SurveyWriter has added a feature to its Merge Grid Question type that enables you to create a double-ended rating question. more

Make SurveyWriter.net a Trusted Site
If you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 or later to access SurveyWriter, make sure to make SurveyWriter.net a Trusted Site.  more

Support Shorts
Prefix available on Numeric Text Box Questions
Table Editor
Sort Question - Show Selected Answer Always Using Exclamation Point, !
Data download order
Capture IP Address and Browser Information more

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SurveyWriter Adds Joe Williams to Executive Team
 
Joe Williams, a long-time fixture in Chicago's Marketing and Communications production community, has been tapped to head up SurveyWriter's Media Development division. This division is responsible for developing and supporting new business related to StreamingSurvey.com, a new product from SurveyWriter, which incorporates rich media into our web survey application for the purpose of testing video advertising, animatics, infomercial concepts, movie trailers, or any product or service with a video component.

Before joining SurveyWriter, Joe was president of his own creative communications agency in Chicago, specializing in business-to-business corporate and marketing communications. He has worked with corporate clients such as Accenture, Bank One, Baxter, Microsoft, Monsanto, Quaker, and SBC to develop and produce corporate video and interactive corporate marketing pieces. Previously, Joe worked at Lotus Development where he created their media department, and also The Avid Group, where he established and headed their digital media division. Joe has also served as a contract producer on corporate, political and entertainment projects for HBO, E! Entertainment, Reebok and others.

SurveyWriter is pleased to welcome such an experienced and dynamic talent to our Executive team.

SurveyWriter has added a feature to its Merge Grid Question type that enables you to create a double-ended rating question such as the following:

Here's how to create this question type. 

Create two row questions

1. Build a regular row question that contains the attributes that you want to see in the left hand column of the question.
2. Build a second row question that contains the attributes that you want to see in the right hand column of the question.
3. Make all row answer options in the second question label headings. 

To do so:

• Click Set Answer Options, Format Answer Options.
• Click IO
• Click Label Heading

For your column labels, press the space bar on the first line to create a space on that line. This is needed to make sure that both row questions have a column label but the second question has no text in it. Click Add Codes Ascending because SurveyWriter will not let you leave this screen without creating a code for the column label.

Create merged grid question

Create a merged grid question that follows the two row questions and select merge grid question with labels as your option. Select your two row questions for the merged grid. To find this option, click the down arrow on the Number of line spaces between questions dropdown menu.

Adjust grid size

To make sure that the cell height is identical between the two row questions, you must paste in the following code in the custom script area of the merged grid question. To adjust the height of the table cells in your row questions, change the height parameter for TD.

<style>
TD {height:35;}
#tdPM {height:20;}
#GridHeaderColumn {height:20;}
#GridHeaderRow {height:20;}
</style>

Note: To enhance the look of this question type, we selected white for the Grid Header Color, lightgrey for the Grid Odd # Row Color, and whitesmoke for the Grid Even # Row Color. To change colors, click Survey Options > Fonts.

Make SurveyWriter.net a Trusted Site

If you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 or later to access SurveyWriter, make sure to make SurveyWriter.net a Trusted Site. If you do not, your IE browser may automatically disable the following SurveyWriter features:

• Scripts (certain programs in SurveyWriter require scripting to be enabled)
• ActiveX Controls (such as the Charting program in reports)
• File downloads (such as the Manage Translation program) 

To make SurveyWriter.net a trusted site, click:

Support Shorts 

This section of the newsletter is devoted to answering frequently-asked questions that have come into our Support Department in the last month. 

Prefix available on Numeric Text Box Questions

If you want to put a character such as $ before a numeric text box, you can now do so. In a numeric text box question, click Modify Options. The Prefix Text field has been added right next to the Text to Append to Text Box field.

Data download order

At some point, you may have downloaded your data and pulled it into SPSS or other similar analytical tool. Then, you needed to add a question into the middle of a SurveyWriter survey, which would require that you reset your formatting in the other package to accommodate the new question and the different question order. SurveyWriter provides a new option on the Questions Menu called Data Download Order. This allows you to specify the order in which your questions are downloaded. If you've inserted a new question in the middle of your survey, you can download it so that it appears in the last question column of your survey results. This makes it easier for you to import the file with the new question into your statistical software if you already have an earlier version of that project set up there.

Table Editor

A table editor is now available from anywhere the button bar of the HTML editor is displayed from the Question Menu or on any of the specialty pages of the survey including introduction, project header, project footer, etc.

Using the table editor, you can quickly create an HTML table. The editor allows you to select the number of rows, number of columns, border size, cell padding and cell spacing for your table. Currently, to reformat an existing table, you will need to click on the HTML button to manually edit the table's HTML code. A right click/edit feature will be added in the near future to make this task easier.

Sort Question - Show Selected Answer Always Using Exclamation Point, !

The Sort Formula question allows you to sort the values from previous answers and return a specific result. Using a Sort function question, you could create a question that chooses a random three out of five possible concepts and displays them in a follow up question. In some cases, you may also want to select one concept that should always be shown along with your random concepts. To do so, add the exclamation point to end of the value to always generate as follows:

In the example above, SurveyWriter will randomly select 2 of the 5 answers and will always select the answer in row 1 for each respondent.

For more information on how to create a Sort Function question, see the Question Design Guide.

Capture IP Address and Browser Information

To capture a respondent's IP address in your data set, place the following command into a Calculation Function Question: 

Request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_HOST")

To capture a respondent's browser information, place the following command into a Calculation Function Question: 

Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_USER_AGENT")

Thank you for your continued support of SurveyWriter. If you have any topics that you would like see addressed in future editions, please email me.