Any or all respondent records can be exported to a file, viewed on the screen or printed using this procedure. A filter enables you to select which records are selected for export. You can also choose which fields of each respondent's record are exported, including Name, Address, City, State, Zip, Phone Number, etc.

 

Export Respondent Records form

 

When you export respondents, information in their record is merely read; no changes or deletions of any kind are performed on your respondent  database!

 

Selection Criteria

 

Use the options in the Selection Criteria section of the screen to filter the desired records you wish to export information on, such as phone number, demo, gender, date (when they were most recently called) and Zip code.  Keep in mind, you are only exporting information (which you will select in the Fields To Print section to the right) about any respondents that match the criteria you have specified; the actual respondent records will not be changed, moved or deleted in any manner.

 

To quickly set the screen so that all respondent records in your database will be output, click on the Export ALL Records option in the lower left corner.

 

Check this box to export all respondents

 

You can also use the current status of each respondent record as a filter criteria, by selecting the various status settings you're interested in, or All to select respondents regardless of status.  If you click Check History, then not only will their current respondent status be evaluated, but ComQuest will also search through all history records for each respondent, in hopes of finding a record with the status matching those you desire (such as a respondent that is now Not Qualified, but was previously a Complete).

 

Select any or all of the Ethnicity and Station listening attributes you wish to include.  If you want to include stations that are not among your primary 6, click on the Other selection, and you can choose from any of your Auxiliary Stations as well. Note that these are all either/or settings.  For example, if you have multiple choices selected, as in the stations in the screen shot above, the respondent merely needs to have any one of these checked on their respondent record in order to qualify them for exporting (they aren't required to have all the choices you've selected, only any one of them). If you want to use a respondent's cume choices, rather than their preference choice (the default), select the Use Cume Not Pref option; the column header will change to reflect your selection, and only the respondents' cume choices will be evaluated when sorting through respondent records, not their preference.

 

Fields To Print

 

Click on any fields from each respondent record that you want to include in your data export. In case you are sending the report to the printer, there is an aggregate Line length displayed at the top of this section, which changes depending on which fields you currently have selected.  You should try to keep this Line length to 72 or less, so that each respondent's record prints on one line each, rather than wrapping to a second line.

 

Sort Order

 

You can select whether to sort your data by Respondent Number (their unique ID number), Phone Number or chronologically, by the Date Last Called.

 

Destination

 

To first view the exported records, perhaps to see how many will be located matching the criteria you specify, select Screen from the Destination drop box.  To send the results directly to your default printer, select Printer as the destination. To save the exported records as an ASCII text file, select File and enter the file name and optional path to which the records will be exported. You can create a file of exported records to any folder on the computer's hard drive, directly to the floppy drive (so that you can later move it to another computer), or over your ComQuest network.

 

After you've selected the filtering and output options and selected the destination for your exported records, click the OK button to begin processing. A counter will indicate the progress of the export, and show you how many records meeting your criteria have been exported.

 

If you export respondent records to a file that already exists, the current data in that file will be overwritten.

 

Before printing exported records, it's a good idea to first export the records to the screen.  This will assure you that you've selected the desired filter criteria, and are outputting the correct fields.  Once you're sure everything is set correctly, you can print directly from the view screen.

 

When exporting respondent records to a file, the format is what's referred to as "fixed-length ASCII".

 

If you require the records in another format, it's easy to import the ASCII file into Microsoft Excel, and then Save As your desired format from within Excel.