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Surveying the Scene, Projecting the Future, Bending Your Will

Various professionals review an assortment of hardware and software.

New software packages give you insight into customers, projects, and estate planning. Our CEO reviewers take their measure

SOFTWARE
AutoData Survey, from AutoData Systems, Minnetonka, MN (800-662-2192, $295); survey design and tabulation software

REVIEWER
Pat Heffernan, copresident of Marketing Partners Inc., a 5-year-old research, marketing, and public-relations firm in Burlington, VT

REQUIREMENTS
486 or higher PC-compatible with Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, 8 MB RAM (16 MB recommended), at least 5 MB free hard-drive space

If you need to conduct basic customer-satisfaction surveys on a regular basis, you may be delighted with AutoData's Survey. This easy-to-use, soup-to-nuts package will help you create, design, process, and analyze surveys using standard reports. But if you require complex surveys, you may be disappointed.

To test the software, I re-created two client surveys used in our company. First, I replicated the warranty questionnaire for the Concept II Indoor Rower. The program created an attractive warranty card, provided painless processing, and produced speedy reports.

Entering questions was easy. After typing in "Did your equipment arrive in good order?" and clicking on the Done button, I received a prompt from Survey and selected a response option. The software offers common multiple-choice response formats--for example, "yes or no" and "very satisfied" to "very dissatisfied," on a scale of 1 to 5--and then automatically numbers and attractively lays out the question-and-response options.

You can create custom-response formats with up to 10 variables per question and select open-ended comment boxes. The comment-box feature is great, but it does have a glitch: when I selected a comment box, it threw off the numbering of the questions that followed. That left me with two options: leaving questions unnumbered or putting questions with comment boxes at the end of the questionnaire.

You can process completed surveys by using a scanner, fax, or keyboard entry. Survey supports popular scanners directly, but for others you have to configure the setup. The system can handle as many as 1.6 million responses to the same survey and can do up to 4,000 different surveys--compare that with other programs that handle from 500 to 2,000 surveys.

The software comes with two fixed formats for reports: histogram and trend analysis. Both calculated quickly and were clearly laid out. The histogram report displays a bar graph for each question, showing how many responses were received for each option. It also provides a numerical and percentage breakdown of the responses for each question, as well as the mean and standard deviation. My histogram reported that 6% of respondents plan to use the Indoor Rower in a rehabilitation center or hospital. The trend-analysis report tracks the change in response over time. We learned that over a six-month period, use of the Rower in rehab environments increased by 2%.

Next, I wanted to see if Survey could meet the needs of a cancer-screening program for the Vermont Department of Health. It could not. The program doesn't have a word-wrap feature, so to enter and read long, public-opinion-style questions, in which a lengthy statement is followed by a list of opinions, I had to hit the Enter key often, which was annoying. Neither can it handle comment boxes for open-ended responses and if-then branching questions, both of which the cancer-screening questionnaire included in abundance.

To make matters worse, the cross-tab reports were meaningless. When I printed out a report on women over 65 who'd had mammograms, I got an attractive table--without a title. The system did allow me to go back in and add a label, but it was too little, too late; most survey programs label reports automatically.

Despite its limitations, the package has its strong points. Its primer, "Satisfaction Surveys: A How-To Guide," written by University of Minnesota professor Ron Matross, includes tips on choosing a survey type, designing questionnaires, analyzing results, reporting options, and creating sample surveys. It will take the angst out of your survey planning.

SOFTWARE
Project Scheduler 7, from Scitor Corp., Menlo Park, CA (800-533-9876, $595); a mainstream project management software package

REVIEWER
Michael A. Willett, senior project manager with Kelly Construction Co., a commercial/industrial construction manager in Manchester, N.H.