SPSS | Desktop Author™

Build surveys more easily

It’s crucial for you to understand people’s attitudes and preferences in order to provide the products and services they want most. A common challenge, however, is creating surveys that capture these insights, and that people will actually want to complete.

Desktop Author helps you meet this challenge. It enables you to create sophisticated surveys with a professional look and feel. Using its simple, intuitive interface, anyone can develop visually appealing surveys of any length, right from the desktop. Building your survey is easy—it's similar to creating a PowerPoint® presentation. Click here to view a demonstration!

With Desktop Author, you can add value and efficiency to all your survey research projects

Improve response rates by creating surveys that respondents want to complete
Get into the field faster and with fewer errors, collect insight efficiently, and distribute results to decision-makers faster
Eliminate the need to maintain separate surveys for different languages and modes

New features help you create surveys even faster

Desktop Author simplifies the survey creation process by providing you with all the tools you need to create your survey. For example, you can:

Write different types of survey questions directly in Desktop Author
Compose questions and instructions in any language
Manage languages and custom phrasings
Create and manage survey logic and routings
Test the entire survey or preview a specific question or group of questions—without having to publish it to a server

The new Question Wizard feature makes it even easier to create your survey by guiding you through the entire process. Question Wizards can be built to ask questions about the audience or subject matter, for example, or provide choices that can be used to create a survey, complete with the questions, routing, and analysis instructions. You can save any Question Wizards you develop to Desktop Author’s local library or to the Predictive Enterprise Repository.

Additional new features enable you to spell-check questions, descriptions, and response lists. You can also introduce a question or set of questions that will be automatically repeated on each survey page. Survey creators can specify question templates for custom controls such as calendar and dates; indicate minimum and maximum values; choose what layout and “look” they want; and specify how they want labels, values, and missing values handled upon export to SPSS Statistics.

You’ll save even more time with Desktop Author because you can create your survey once, and then use it to collect feedback in any mode. Deploy your survey over the Web, by telephone, face-to-face, through mobile collection devices—whatever suits your needs. You can indicate what mode a given routing or wording applies to, whether that is one mode or more than one; and if certain question types or routings are not suitable to a mode, they cannot be selected for that mode.

In short, Desktop Author makes survey creation fast, fun, and error-free.

Save time and plan for the future
When you use Desktop Author, you can use the local library to store your important information, such as pre-made questions, survey templates, and entire surveys.

By storing your crucial information, you can ask exactly the same set of questions in the same way each time you deploy your survey.

Now, you can also store and manage survey components in the Predictive Enterprise Repository, a component of SPSS Predictive Enterprise Services™. Learn more about the advantages offered by this groundbreaking product.

Additional information about Desktop Author is available in the freely downloadable Dimensions Development Library™.

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