Dedoose Articles

Article: Dedoose Multi-Survey Importer: From Excel to a Fully Populated Dedoose Project in Seconds

1/16/2014

survey-1

SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Zoomerang, SurveyGizmo, QuestionPro, or any other form of data collection or organization that can get your data to a spreadsheet and you are ready to import your data for analysis in Dedoose. We’ve been listening to the many happy users who’ve taken advantage of this Dedoose feature or any of the other migration tools we’ve created for Atlas.ti, NVivo, HyperResearch, MaxQDA or other tools and our importers are more robust than ever.

As, many Dedoose users have already learned, making use of the Dedoose survey importer is a huge time saver when you have data or can export/convert data to an Excel spreadsheet. So if you are using tools for your qualitative research data or a study that involves mixed method research where you can get to a spreadsheet, you can move from this…

survey-2

..to this…

Screenshot 24-1

…with just a few clicks of your mouse.

Awesome! Yes! The Dedoose survey importer:

  1. Scans your file to identify which columns contain closed-ended descriptor data and which contain open-ended narrative responses
  2. Creates a descriptor set
  3. Creates descriptor fields (columns) by grabbing the column headers for each closed-ended response field
  4. Creates descriptors (rows) for each case
  5. Creates a code system by grabbing the column header for each open-ended response field
  6. Grabs all the open-ended content for each case, compiles into one Dedoose document
  7. Links each document to the appropriate case (descriptor) and
  8. Excerpts and codes all the open ended-responses with the appropriate code.

All automatically and, thus, in just seconds, you are ready to start taking advantage of all Dedoose analytic features.

But now there is more!

In its first life, the Dedoose Survey Importer was great for single imports. Yet, users don’t always collect all their data at once and importing additional sets of data into existing project required some clean up.

Not any more!

The Dedoose Survey Importer graduated to a higher class of smartness. As long as your first column of data is a unique values—like in our sample ‘ID’ field we just numbered the cases from ‘1’ to ‘196,’ Dedoose can be much more clever. The importer is now smart enough to:

  1. Recognize if a particular row of qualitative data or quantitative data has been imported before—so if you simply add new cases to a big file you are building from your data collection you won’t get any repeat cases when imported to Dedoose
  2. Add the new descriptors to the existing set—before a new set was created with duplicate fields and
  3. Map codes to the existing code tree so no duplicates are created

So much more efficient and this re-programming has also opened a door for the development of another awesome new Dedoose feature. Hush hush, but stay tuned for that one coming soon to Dedoose near you!