subsummary of value list?

[RachelSH]

Disclaimer: I'm an Access person, but my boss set up a FileMakerPro 5 document/database to collect survey data, and now it's my job to figure out how to extract and slice & dice the data.

We have over 50 questions that asked people to choose A, B, or C. A,B & C were entered in FMP as a value list, and each question was given a field with the person doing the data entry choosing the appropriate answer from the value list.

Now I need to know how many people answered A, how many B, etc. for every single one of these questions.

I'm trying to learn how FMP works, but the more I read the manual, the more I'm afraid it might not do what I need to do. I thought I could toss a Count summary field of Question 1 into a subsummary part, but I'm not having any luck. I think my problem is that I'm trying to use the same field as the break field and the basis for the summary field, but I'm not sure what to do.

Any suggestions? Or do I need to buckle down and try to export this thing (lack of field labels and all) into a different program? (Since all the data is already entered, if the database itself has been created incorrectly, there's not a lot I can do about it at this point.)

[Søren Dyhr]

There is one critical issue here, the choises are the radio buttons or checkboxes ...can an answer have more than one choise selected.

If we're with the former, is it pretty simple a summary report with the choice is breaker value. But if with the later, where multible choices can be made for each question is it going to be a cross-tab report, which is one of filemakers weak points, requirering crafty developer skills:

http://www.onegasoft.com/tools/fastsummaries/index.shtml

The reason is that filemaker have more of a focus towards making the tool for making applications instead of a reporting tool.

So you might be in a - picking the right tool situation, is the measures in your choise worth applying??

--sd

[comment]

if the database itself has been created incorrectly, there's not a lot I can do

Yes, you can. The eaiest way would probably be to export the data to Excel, pivot it and import it to a new Filemaker file - so that at the end you have a separate record for each person/question/response combination (see also here). Then you can do a summary report.