New Tool Turns Microsoft Office into Survey Suite

Torben Laustsen and Fred Balkenende, the creators of Danish data collection survey software tool TricTrac, have launched a new piece of software called OfficeReports, said to convert Microsoft Office into a complete data analysis and reporting suite for surveys.

Laustesen and Balkenende developed the TricTrac solution through their firm I & A Software, which they sold to Scandinavian company Software Innovation in 2000, for 6.4m Danish kroner.

Their new product, OfficeReports, embeds full market research data analysis and reporting capabilities within PowerPoint and Word in Microsoft's standard Office suite. Laustsen and Balkenende say that unlike other research tools that integrate with Office, OfficeReports actually converts PowerPoint and Word into fully functional survey analysis and reporting programmes capable of reading raw survey data and producing the cross-tabular and statistical analysis that researchers typically need.

The solution is provided as a download which adds data analysis capabilities as a new menu in both Word and PowerPoint. This includes creating new variables and cross-tabs, defining filtering, weighting and statistics, and refining the output formats. Outputs, which are standard XML Office documents, can be shared with any other Microsoft Office user.

Balkenende comments: 'We know that Microsoft Office is what researchers use more than anything else, but researchers spend a lot of time cutting and pasting from the program they used to analyze the data. Our goal with OfficeReports is to add the missing data processing engine into Office so that researchers have only one programme to use when reporting on a survey, rather than juggling with two.'

Web site: www.officereports.com .