In article <[log in to unmask]>, David Dawson <[log in to unmask]> writes >Is any museum-ler using specialist software to undertake visitor surveys >(ie not standard spreadsheets) > >Would be grateful for any experiences out there. You have to be clear whether the point of using a software package is primarily to ease data capture or to do the subsequent analysis. I looked at some survey software packages for a survey of archives in UK universities we did last year (the report is available at http://www.willpower.demon.co.uk/JISC/Survey1.htm). Some packages are * "inQuest" <http://www.inquest.co.uk/> * "Soft Survey" <http://www.softsurvey.com> * "?Quest ?Questionnaire" <mailto:[log in to unmask]> * "Question Mark Designer for Windows" I didn't find any package that could handle all of the types of question we needed to ask, such as filling in a two-dimensional table, allocating percentages to several items in a list, or combining pre-set answers with additional ones typed in by respondents under the heading "Other (specify)". It would have been possible to construct a computer form to collect this information, but the point of most of the packages is that they also do the analysis, and they didn't give us the flexibility which we obtained by having the data in a spreadsheet so that we could generate many different tables and figures. The survey was conducted by post, so we had to produce tidy questionnaires on paper - I don't think that many of the respondents would have preferred to fill in forms on a screen, because they often had to go away and find information before they could complete it. I didn't look in detail at the heavyweight analysis packages such as SPSS or SAS, because they would have been overkill for our needs: they might be worth considering if you were doing a lot of survey work. Leonard Will -- Willpower Information (Partners: Dr Leonard D Will, Sheena E Will) Information Management Consultants Tel: +44 181 372 0092 27 Calshot Way, Enfield, Middlesex, EN2 7BQ, UK Fax: +44 181 372 0094 [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] --------------- <URL: http://www.willpower.demon.co.uk/> ---------------