We have been asked numerous times whether you can analyze data collected through other means in Remark Office OMR’s built-in analysis engine, Remark Quick Stats®. For instance, we have had customers who prior to purchasing the software had hand entered data into a CSV or Excel file for various surveys and they want to analyze it in Remark Quick Stats. This can be accomplished, but there are some tricks you will need to learn (and some work you will need to do) in order to make this work. Remark Quick Stats works from a Remark Office OMR template file. So, to bring in external data sets you need to create a Remark Office OMR template that matches the data being imported. This template must exactly match the column headers and answer choices for each question contained in the data file.
Here is a little excerpt from a recent conversation with Remark Customer Hall of Famer Susan Voigt from the Capital Area Intermediate Unit Enola, PA:
“A few weeks ago, we submitted a grant proposal that required the use of data from a needs assessment survey. For a variety of reasons, the data was collected through a non-Gravic product. It was provided to us in raw data format and some default PDF graphs that were not helpful. In addition, there were some results that needed to be split into two data sets, which could not be done easily with the default graphs.
However, Remark came to our rescue! Rather than fight with the other tool, I created a very quick survey in Word for the data sets I needed. Since the results were eventually going to be written about in a narrative form, I didn’t worry too much about making the Word document “pretty” with nice fonts, headers, or logos. I scanned it into Remark and created a template with OMR regions. This was the one tricky part as the raw data and field names had to match EXACTLY. Even an extra space or capitalization difference would affect the data analysis.
After creating the template, rather than scanning completed surveys, I simply copied and pasted the raw data into a Remark data file. From there, I ran several reports on the data analysis exactly as I would have done if I had scanned the data from paper surveys. The calculations worked beautifully, and the graphs were so easy to read and turn into narratives for the proposal! It took a little bit of work and careful attention to the data and field names, but it was definitely a lot easier than manually analyzing nearly 300 surveys!”
With a bit of work, Susan was able to save a great deal of time by using Remark Office OMR to analyze her data set. For more information on Remark Office OMR please visit our webpages that cover all the features, check out the survey analysis and test grading analysis reports, download a free demo or contact us for more information.