7 Things You Need to Know About Crosstab Software

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7 Things to Know about Crosstab Software[/caption]Crosstab software is not just a valuable analytic tool. It’s an essential analytic tool. Here are seven things you need to know about crosstab software that can help you make the most of it. It provides deep insights.Superficial survey results may be fine for a quick overview of information, but crosstab software can take that information to a much deeper level. While surface results of a customer satisfaction survey can tell you how many people are thrilled with your business, crosstab software can tell you specifics about those happy customers, such as:

• Gender and age
• Income level and occupation
• First-time vs. repeat buyers
• Products or services purchased that made them happy
• Any other combination of variables you choose

It helps you find hidden trends.With the ability to easily arrange, rearrange and filter data, crosstab software provides you with the power to home in on specific facts that help uncover hidden trends. Sales data, for example, can be arranged and filtered by variables such as:

• Date of purchase
• Product or service purchased
• Purchaser details, such as age, gender, income and other factors

Here you can find which products sell best to specific customers during certain seasons – and align your marketing efforts accordingly.It presents large amounts of data in an easy-to-review format.Reviewing information in database format can be confusing and headache-inducing. Reviewing that same data with crosstab software can give you results that are easy to both set up and understand. You can summarize massive amounts of data using a crosstab query, which arranges your chosen information in a concise format similar to a spreadsheet.It has its own terminology. Crosstab terminology may be unique, but it’s also pretty straightforward. Terms you may run across include:

• Banners: Refer to variables listed in columns
• Stubs: Refer to variables listed in rows
• Expected values: Results you expect, such as 50-percent odds of getting heads on a coin flipped 100 times
• Chi-square statistics: How actual results compare to expected results, or how many times heads actually comes up during those 100 coin flips

It requires data preparation. Reviewing crosstab software results may be simple, but preparing data for use in the software takes a tad more effort. Data needs to formatted, explored, prepared with variables in columns and identifiers in rows, and reviewed to ensure no data is missing. Professional analysists can help with the data prep to ensure accurate results.It does all the heavy lifting for you.Attempting to manually create crosstab reports is not even an option. It’s not feasible to even try to manually arrange such large quantities of data, especially if you expect the results to be accurate and error-free. Crosstab software lets you easily upload prepped datasets, then provides features that let you just as easily present and share your results.Not only does crosstab software provide an easy way to dig deep into large amounts of data, uncover hidden trends and present your findings, but it ensures your survey results are scientifically valid. It lets you confirm or disprove your hypothesis, transforming your conclusion from a “good guess” into a non-disputable fact. And facts always far outweigh guesses when it comes to creating surefire strategies to better your business.