Reporting Values

What is a Reporting Value?

A Reporting Value is a value that our internal system uses to pull information for your reports, exports, and logic. Reporting values can not be seen by your customers, and will be the same as your answer options unless you specifically indicate for them to be something else.

What is the difference between an Answer Option and a Reporting Value?

The main difference between option titles and reporting values come from their visibility to customers, and whether or not you can change them after data has already been collected. Your answer option titles are visible to the customer, and your reporting values are visible only in Reports/Exports

When would I use reporting values?

A great example of why you would want to change your reporting values is you may have very long answer options, but want to be able to put your data into a pie chart or bar chart during data analysis. Trying to put a long option into those can make them look sloppy, or unreadable. Instead, if you use shorter reporting values, or numbers in their place, you can more easily use them on your graphs.

**NOTE**: Similarly, if you’re reporting with SPSS, it will only deal with numeric values for questions like radio buttons and checkboxes. For this reason we recommend setting reporting values to numeric values before launching the survey. To learn more, please see Exporting to SPSS

WARNING: Changing your Reporting Values

What if I make a mistake, and my survey is already collecting data, can I change my reporting values?

The quick answer is ‘Yes, You can’, although we highly recommend making sure you have made any changes prior to distributing the survey. While we do have the ability now to change reporting values after the fact, it does not work with all question types, and depending on how complex your survey is, VERY difficult to do. If you absolutely have to change your reporting values after the fact, please see our Tutorial: Changing Reporting Values Best Practices, and contact support at support@sgizmo.com for help.

What if I’m still in the testing phase, and I haven’t collected any real data yet?

In that case, you’re welcome to change your reporting values at any time, as long as you’re sure you don’t need any of the data. If the system locks you our from bulk changing your reporting values, you can use our Reset Survey Button to make the system allow you to change them. For more information, please see: https://support.surveygizmo.com/entries/20538688-reset-survey-button

How can I change my Reporting Values?

There are three ways in which you can change your reporting values:

1. While Creating a Question in Advanced Edit mode: In Bulk or Individually
2. During Advanced Editing: Individually
3. During Advanced Editing: In Bulk

While Creating a Question in Advanced Edit mode: In Bulk or Individually

First, you’ll need to create your question. You can do so by going to the Build & Edit tab and clicking “Add question.”  This will take you to advanced edit mode. 

When adding your question, you have the option to update your reporting values as well.

1. First, enter your question
2. Type in your answer options
3. You can add reporting values that are different from your answer options by separating them with a | symbol.
• For example: If you want your reporting values to be numeric, you could put Jason|1, or Bill|3
4. Remember to click “Add Question”.

During Advanced Editing: Individually

In order to access this, on your Build & Edit tab, click on the small pencil icon to the left of the question you would like to edit.

You may find that during editing that you only want to change one reporting value to something separate.

• For example: You may find a typo, or you may have forgotten to change the reporting values while creating your question.

Step 1: To do so, click under the Reporting Value column next to the answer option you’d like to change.

Step 2. Next, you enter the new Reporting Value in the “Reporting Value:” section.

**PLEASE NOTE**: We HIGHLY recommend not changing your reporting values after you have already collected data you wish to keep. If you have to however, please see our Tutorial: Changing Reporting Values Best Practices, and contact support at support@sgizmo.com for help.

Step 3: Always remember to Save your data.

During Advanced Editing: In Bulk

In order to access this, on your Build & Edit tab, click on the small pencil icon to the left of the question you would like to edit.

You may want to change all or multiple of your reporting values at once. If so, please follow the steps below:

Step 1: Once inside the question editor, click on “Add/Edit Answers in Bulk”

Step 2: Replace your Reporting values

Once inside, you’ll notice that your answer options and reporting values  are separated by pipes ( | ). It will be in the following format:

 Answer option|Reporting value.

For example: Let’s say you want your answer options to be in text, but your reporting values to be numeric, you can just replace the information after the | with numbers. (As seen below). 

Step 3: Save your work.

After you’ve saved, you will be brought back into the question editor. You’ll want to confirm that your reporting values are correct, then click save again.

Reporting

Summary Reports

When reporting on your data in a Summary Report, you can choose to use the reporting values, or answer option titles to display. In the image below, you’ll see we’re showing the answer titles. 

When you create a summary report, the answer options are set by default. If you want to remove them and use reporting values instead, please  follow the following steps:

Step 1: Click into your Summary Report

Step 2: Click to on the Edit Questions

Step 3: Click on the small pencil icon to the right of the question you’d like to change over to reporting values.

Step 4: Click on the checkbox next to ‘Answer Titles:’.

This box is checked by default, but if  you remove the check, it will display your reporting values in the reports (instead of the answer options).

Step 5: Save your changes.

Step 6: Close the Edit Question lightbox

Step 7: Click on “Refresh Data”

It should end up looking like this:

**Note**: You’ll now see the reporting values in the “Value” column.

Individual Response Reporting

Whenever you view your individual responses on the overview tab, these will show you only your reporting values. To access this information, please see below:

Step 1: Go to your View Responses Tab

Step 2: Click on an individual response (you can click on the response line, or the magnifying glass to the left of each response).

Step 3: Make sure you’re on the Data tab. (All data on this screen will be reported in Reporting Values).

Exporting your Data

CSV/EXCEL

When you export your data to excel, it will always show you your reporting values.

Above, you can see that Column 6 is from Question 1 that had numeric reporting values, and Column H is Question 2 that had textual reporting values. The Excel export will always reflect whatever reporting value you had listed. 

SPSS

if you’re reporting with SPSS, it will only deal with numeric values for questions like radio buttons and checkboxes. For this reason we recommend setting reporting values to numeric values before launching the survey. 

If your responses do not have numeric reporting values our system will auto assign them using the internal option skus, which are 5 digit numbers that we assign to each answer option. Without the ability to use web developer tools, these can be hard to identify, so it’s best to define your reporting values before hand. 

For example: Above, you can see that in var 2, we had indicated numeric reporting values before the data was collected. In var3, we did not, so our system has filled them in with our internal option skus. 

What if I didn’t add numeric reporting values, and I’d like to just figure out which option sku goes with which answer option?

While it may be very tedious, this is possible. You can do so by following the steps below.

Step 1: Download a firebug or webdeveloper extension to your browser (firefox or chrome) 
Step 2: You could also export your data to csv/excel (Current Project tab–>Report/Export Data–> View Export–> Create New Export –>CSV/EXCEL) and then import it to SPSS separately, this way you could define your numeric reporting values as you’d like to see them.

If you decide to go with #1 when you do not indicate numeric reporting values within the system, when it exports to SPSS, it will use the answer option skus (a 5 digit number) for that question. You can tell the option skus for the question using an extension to your firefox or chrome browser called “firebug” or “Webdeveloper”.

What you do once that’s installed is right click the answer option within the Build & Edit tab for each question, and then it will give you a 5 digit number. It will look something like sgE_123456_7_89_10005

123456 is your survey id
7 is the page sku 
89 is the question id 
10005 is your option sku