Creating compound grids

If you are creating an interactive questionnaire (for Web or Offline electronic surveys) you can place grid questions next to each other to make them easier to complete. For example, you could combine two grid questions on goods and services; one on how satisfied users are with each, and the other on how important each is. Grids arranged in this way are easier to complete and can appear less daunting than the equivalent arrangement of successive grids.

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Compound grids can made up of questions of any response type. For example, you could assemble several quantity response grid questions into one compound grid.

Background

Compound grids let you display two or more grid questions next to each other. They share row labels, and look like a single question to the respondent. You could set up a grid made up of several series of open questions, where the respondent can enter a separate value in each row and column. You could also set up related multiple choice questions, such as the quality and importance of a set of features.

You may need to edit the survey slightly to make the compound grids work. For the grids to be grouped into a compound grid they must:

follow each other in the questionnaire (with no intervening page break)
contain the same number of questions
use the grid question styles, or styles based on them (Grid First, Grid Next and Open First, Open Next).
have the same settings for Show|Space Before and Show|Line Before.

For example, to combine three grids of quantity questions, you would set them up in Snap so they looked something like this:

After processing by the CompoundGrid tool, the questions are assembled into a single grid:

Summary of steps

The example below shows how to set up a compound grid of satisfaction and importance ratings.

Step 1: Set up the grid or series questions to be joined in the questionnaire
Step 2: Group the questions in the published survey
Step 3: Fine-tune the column widths as required
Step 4: Process the survey to create the compound grid

Step 1: Set up the grid or series questions to be joined in the questionnaire

In this tutorial we have created two grid questions consisting of single-response questions, each with five answer codes. The labels on the second set of questions are blank. The first question in each grid is in the style Like Grid First. The other questions are in the style Like Grid Next.

Open the survey and create the grid questions. In the example shown, the second grid has been given a colored background to make it easy to differentiate between the two parts in the published survey.
Open the publish dialog for the survey by selecting File|Publish or pressing [Control][Shift][W].
Take a note of the path of the published file.

Step 2: Group the questions in the published survey

Start the Compound Grid tool. You would normally do this by Selecting [Start] on the Microsoft toolbar, then type Compound Grid in the ‘Search programs and files’ box.
Browse for the published file that you previously noted. The file will have an .htm suffix for a Web HTML survey, a .zip suffix for a Snap WebHost survey or an .msf suffix for an Offline electronic survey.
Type a number in the Page box or use the controls to find the page containing the grid questions that you wish to combine.
Select the questions and click [Group].
The Group grid questions dialog appears.
If you wish to add header text to the compound grid, check the Add header text box and enter the heading in the box.
Click the [Preview] button to preview the compound grid question.

Step 3: Fine-tuning the grid questions

If you are not happy with the way that the compound grid looks in the preview, you can adjust the column widths.

Click the [Edit] button. The Column width editor dialog will be displayed.
Change the percentage width beneath the columns to adjust the column widths. Click [Apply] to see how it will look with the new widths.
When you are satisfied with the look of your compound grid, click [OK].

If you change a width, the CompoundGrid tool automatically adjust the percentages of the unchanged columns to fit, so if you wish to keep any columns as they are, you must tick the lock box(es) for those columns. The lock boxes are below the percentage width boxes.