Hi - I have recently built a survey - which works fine (my first) using a range of question types and conditional logic (e.g. if answered 'C' on radio button - then ask this question next etc.).Took a while but seems to be OK. I have not used survey attributes at the start - a) wasn't sure what they were; b) I wanted exact answers from respondents to search with / avoid typos etc. - using predefined answer options.

I now want to be able to do two things:

1) begin to customise how I see the survey results and;

2) produce a finished report for these results.


1) Here I want to be able to select the group of respondents who for example answered "Yes - work in the food industry"; "Yes - I am an engineer"; "Yes - I am female" (some of these responses will be predefined in drop-down answers). I think this might require an 'attribute table' - where I can see / select the permutations I want - but I could be wrong? Any help very welcome.

2) As for the report itself - again I think I need to 'export' the data set to a 'report writer' - which will do this for me - is this correct? If so, and given that I am a numpty newbie - I would be grateful if someone could suggest a reasonably simple report writer - or other solution?

Thanks for listening !

Alan

Limesurvey has some built in reporting features. However, these features are very basic and basically mainly to get a first idea of the responses while the research is still in field. You can filter responses based on certain questions, so this is possible.

For further analysis I would recommend to use a different tool. As you are asking for simple, I would go with some spreadsheet software like Excel or Calc. There you can filter the responses based on the answers given to certain questions and you can create graphs from that.

Hi Holch - thanks for the reply - can you tell me a bit more about how to "filter responses based on certain questions" - or should I just export the whole data set into Excel and filter there ?

Cheers - Alan

PS - assuming I do want to make my final report very professional looking - is there a Report Writer you would recommend?

In the "Responses" --> "Responses & Statistics" --> "Statistics" you can use the "Response filters" where you can show which responses you want analyze. E.g. you want to see only results for "female" respondents. Or for "female, age 20-25 years, with a white dog and curly hair (whatever your questions in your survey are).

To the second part: I am not sure what you want as a report writer. The "Report Writer" is you!

In Market Research we usually use SPSS or other statistical packages to analyze, for simple things Excel is more than enough. Then to create the actual report we usually use PowerPoint, especially when we use a lot of graphs, some clients want a word document.

Reports only look professional, if you know what you are doing. It depends less on the tool, but rather on your design skills.

Hi Holch - thanks again fro the prompt reply. I will go and start using Excel to see if I can get the customised reports that I need along with the filters you suggest. I found another useful post "Customized individual response reports" which is very helpful

As for the report writer - apologies for the confusion. I will need to create eventually several hundred individual reports for each user group - once I have their individual data sets defined. I had seen in other posts discussions about 'report writers' - one talked about Twig I think - which could automate the generation of these final professional reports - so I thought the term "Report Writer" was well known within the community - sorry for the confusion.

I am probably getting ahead of myself and will concentrate for now on creating the individual data sets - before worrying about how they look!

Thanks again - Alan

I will need to create eventually several hundred individual reports for each user group - once I have their individual data sets defined.

And there is the problem. Depending on the sets and how different to analyze they are, you might not be able to automate this a lot.

We don't know what you are actually trying to do, so there is little of specific advice that we can give. If you could let us know in a little bit more detail what your reports need to show and how the different reports differ, we might be able to give a little bit more information.

Maybe you can actually use the same report template, but just need to change the datasets behind it. But as I said, depends very much on the requirements that you have for the different reports.

Hi Holch - thanks for taking the time to look at these posts. If it helps - here is a brief walk through of a similar type of survey to what we want to do.

For example - assume the task is to survey all the national tax offices (there are 200) starting with one tax office survey and then if it goes OK - to roll out the same survey nationally to all 200 offices. Aim is to get 2,000+ replies from each tax office. Survey will be 40 questions, mainly 5 point radio button options -but many have a follow on question - "why do you think the Tax office website is poor?" etc. and "please describe how this could be improved?" etc.

Each finished report for each Tax office will look the same, and report on the same issues, in a standard way. For example a section on 'customer service'; website; 'how friendly were staff' etc. - six sections overall.

There will also be one overall report which collates all the data into one national report - e.g. nationally how satisfied are respondents with 'customer service' etc. - as well as set of tables ranking each office - again overall how each tax office is ranked nationally and how each tax office is ranked for each category.

These are the two hundred reports I mentioned in my earlier posts. In an ideal world I am looking for the ability to generate a consistent individual report either from a predefined data set for each individual tax office; or from the total data set (but I appreciate that this may be difficult).

I also realise we will need to use the pro version of LimeSurvey to do all this.

So in summary, I am trying to work out the best way to prepare each individual data set for each tax office; and how to then use some degree of automation / reporting template - to generate a consistent / standard report which looks professional and can be shared with each tax office.

In the meantime, I will carry on playing around with excel and see if there is a way to get the individual data sets (i.e. for each tax office) before I get too worked up about the report preparation. I am sure there are lots of users who have tackled a similar problem before - its unlikely that I am the first !

Thanks again,

Alan

Hi, Alan,

I also realise we will need to use the pro version of LimeSurvey to do all this.

There is no difference between Pro Edition and the CE Edition regarding features.
The Pro Edition is hosted by Limesurvey, the CE Edition you have to host (and maintain) by yourself.
So you pay for this comfort or convenience.

Okay, Reports:

When I read

Each finished report for each Tax office will look the same

I thought "Well, that's just a matter of filtering"

1. EXCEL - Pivot table
On Youtube you will find a lot of solutions. Just search for "Dashboard EXCEL".
One of my favorites is "MyOnlineTrainingHub" by Mynda Treacy.
And one more basic I found yesterday (German EXCEL version, but without sound, so international): youtu.be/dKxETy8jLCk
In Pivot tables you add the entire data file and just filter by tax office number or whatever.

2. Also you will find a lot of online or desktop solutions. Here just a few.
IfaD Reportbook
FastReport Online
FastReport Desktop
Adobe ReportBuilder
Tableau
It's just a very small selection.

3. If you are a bit experienced in php and MySQL:
a. You can write your own report by querying the database and display the results with a chart library like "highchart.com" or others and save it as pdf (TCPDF library, or other)
b. Or write the results to a prepared EXCEL template (PHPExel, ...).
The EXCEL template contains the structure of the report, all charts and tables. Your program just pipes in the actual data.

4. Now I tell something we did last year in a similar case.
The reports (about 120 pages with 170 charts, some tables) were for a real lot of countries and regions of the world.
So we created a "dummy" report which contained all charts, tables with dummy data and the not changing text elements (the changing text just as placeholders)
It was a Word docx file.
As you might know the Microsoft "docx", "xlsx", ... files are just "zip" files with chanded extension.
So if you rename a docx file to *.zip" you can unzip and you will find a folder structure with lot of files.
And for each chart there is a single EXCEL-file.
Knowing this we created a small Delphi programm which

• renamed the "docx" to "zip" and unzipped
• opened the EXCEL files one after the other
• queried the database and entered the values into the EXCEL file
• closed and saved
• zipped everything again and renamed to "docx" (now with a different filename that reflected the country)

Was some work beforehand, but saved a real lot of time.
The analyst - only - had to write the texts.

Best regards
Joffm

P.S. Something general:
Very often I read here something like "I searched the forum, but did not find".
IMO this due to a bad headline.
You started with "... some basic questions".
But now we talk about reports and report builder, a very special thing.
IMO people should open a new thread with a new meaningful headline.

I think these reports, if they have the same structure for all different "offices" should be easily done.

If you don't want to include advanced statistics, but rather counts or means or medians for the questions, you can surely prepare some template, that you can then use. I would have suggested to create an excel sheet that has in one tab all the charts and in the other tab all the data. Then you can just change (filter by office) the data in the data tab and the charts will represent the results of the respective office. However, 200 reports is quite a lot.

I am sure that with some coding you can make your life a lot easier. Not sure what the best platform / report writer software would be. Joffm proposed a few. Never heard of them except for Tableau, which is a pretty expensive piece of software, but seems to be very powerfull.

Hi Joffm - thanks for a very helpful post - all of which I will follow up on and hopefully other 'beginners' too ! Apologies for going off topic - I was thinking of this more as an ongoing conversation, but take your point that it would be more difficult for someone to find this advise - as it would not be immediately obvious from the title etc.

Thanks again - Alan