Online Evaluation Surveys

There is a "green" trend in the survey business. People are slowly moving away from printed survey documents and towards online evaluation surveys. There are many advantages to this move. With the proliferation of WiFi in most locations where people congregate, wireless cards in laptops and WiFi enabled smartphones, more folks are opting for the convenience of technology in data collection. If you google 'online surveys' and you will find a plethera of online survey software and businesses to suit your every possible situation. It can be overwhelming to say the least.

I dare say that most data-centric researchers don't really want to have to learn the ins and outs of setting up and maintaining an online evaluation project. Considering all the details of buying and learning specialized survey software, designing survey forms in a browser environment, webhosting issues and costs, database construction, etc., can leave one's head spinning.

There are a few online survey specialists midst all the "do-it-yourself" packages that can take care of all the details for you. You simply supply the questions and they will do the rest. Don't get me wrong, the challenge of creating an online survey can be a rewarding learning experience and provide you with many new tools to achieve your data collection goals for future projects. I know, that's what I do. There are plenty of tools out there for you to choose from and free instructional information on the web. Most people, however, like to leave these things to the specialists. Trust me. You will definitely sleep better. We have a motto where I work where we view ourselves as your survey mechanics. "You drive!...We'll take care of the rest!"

Software: Slugger: Issues: Printing Problems

I just received a call from a customer in education who bought multiple copies of Slugger, a program that enables you to overprint personalized data on a preprinted OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) evaluation form. This customer has an evaluation form that is common to multiple campuses that needs personalization with data that is unique to each campus.

Slugger is an excellent program to accomplish this, but it does have a couple of bugs. The problem is that when an overprinting document is created (a .ofc file), it records the printer name and parameters in the first line of this file. If you open the .ofc file with another copy of Slugger on a different computer and try to print to a different printer, you won't be allowed to do so.

The workaround for this problem is as follows:

1. Create a new dummy .ofc file on the machine that you want to print from and add at least one grid.
2. Under the 'File>Print Setup' menu, choose your desired printer and set up the page size, orientation and tray settings and then save your document.
3. Open the original .ofc file created on the first machine in a text editor such as Wordpad.
4. Open up the the new file just created on the new machine in the same text editor.
5. Using copy and paste, replace the second line of the original file with the second line of the second containing the new printer definition information and save the document.

Now you will be able to print to the new printer and even change to other printers on that machine. Unfortunately, there will never be any more updates to this software to correct this glitch so this is the ONLY solution to this issue.

Even considering the weaknesses of this dated piece of software, we personally prefer to use, sell and recommend Slugger as our favorite software package to personalize OMR evaluation forms.

If you are interested in purchasing Slugger or if you have any other questions regarding it's use, please, give us a call at Survey Systems, Inc. 1-800-473-7188.