Customizing Your Report Layout
You can customize SurveyMaker's overview
report in a variety of ways, to fit the needs
of different readers.  Your custom layout
becomes one of the options for viewing or
printing the overview report.

You do this by selecting the view option to
create a custom report format.  You will come
to a workscreen that shows a number of format
options and controls.  You can also call up
the list of key-word descriptors and adjust
each of them individually as you prefer.

For example, you might want to show only
certain selected question items on your
custom report, leaving the others out.  You
can do this simply by calling up the list of
key-word descriptors and marking certain items
as "Hide", meaning they will not appear on the
custom version.
You can also rearrange the sequence of items
as they appear on your custom report.  By
selecting any item with the cursor and
dragging it up or down on the screen display,
you can reposition it as you like.

On the custom workscreen, you have the option
of arranging the items in their original
order, in their ranked order (by mean
value), or in the modified order you have
created.  Further, you can specify whether the
multiple-choice items will be shown as
frequency counts or as percentages of the
number of responses.

And, you can further customize the report by
assigning selected items to groups, with group
headings and group means.  Working with the
list of descriptors, you simply select a
particular item with the cursor and enter its
group title.  All items with the same group
title will be arranged together, with a mean
value showing for that group.

Using this simple customizing technique, you
can designate each item descriptor in terms of
its sequence, its status as showing or hidden,
and its group assignment.  You have further
flexibility in that you can go to the custom-
report workscreen and toggle various features
on or off.  The settings remain, but are in
effect only when you toggle them on.

For example, you might have rearranged the
sequence of items, but you might choose to
show them in their original order for a
certain version of the report.  Or you might
have designated certain items as hidden, but
you might choose to show them on one report
and hide them on another.
The "split-line" feature, available in the
itemized view of multiple-choice items, allows
you to segment the data for a question item.
Hit the F4 key to bring down the F4-Special
menu and take the option to activate the
split-line feature.  This will display a
movable dividing line between the vertical
bars on the display.  At the top of the screen
you will see two percentage values: the
fraction of respondents answering less than
the dividing line and the fraction answering
above.

This allows you to divide the distribution
into contrasting "agree" and "disagree"
components.  Use the horizontal cursor keys to
move the split line back and forth to segment
the multiple-choice scale as you like.  Hit
the F4 key to take the option to turn off the
split-line feature if you don't want it.
When you save your report to a disk file,
SurveyMaker checks to see if you have
specified any custom settings.  If so, it
saves them along with the statistical results.
When you reload the file at a later time,
SurveyMaker will retrieve the custom settings
so you don't have to redo them each time.

You can also save any number of custom formats
as separate .FMT disk files.  When you have a
report loaded, you can load any matching
custom format file and use it to print a
particular variation of the report.

This allows you to have an inventory of format
files which you can apply to a regular report,
such as a monthly survey.  Once you build the
report, you can simply call up the various
format files and print out the various
versions, without having to redo the layouts.