Snorkelnut,
A very interesting use of the KoBo Toolbox, great idea, I just hope you are
keeping your tablet out of the water. I am not sure that it will work
undersea.
It sounds like you set everything up correctly and are getting an
aggregated CSV of your collected data.
In the CSV, you are seeing "weird names and numbers" which are not the
labels that you put in there for the names of fish. I imagine what you are
seeing are the Node names that are auto-assigned by KoBoForm, names like
"A01, A02, A03..." and for the values you see "1,2,3..., etc." Is that
correct?
It's not an error, KoBoForm gives each question an Alias for it's data node
to keep the size of the final data small, and so that you don't name a
variable in your database with the entire text of a lengthy question. The
alias starts with A01 for the first question in your survey.
KoBoForm does the same thing with the values for each option under a
question, so you might label an option "Angelfish", but that label gets a
value of "1", and all the options are given similiar numerical values.
Again, this is because the label can be very long and contain strange
punctuation that could confuse the database.
These values are editable. You can select "Show Advanced
Properties<http://www.kobotoolbox.org/koboform/#>"
in the KoBoForm interface, when a question is selected. If you edit the
field "XML Node", that will be reflected in the database.
As for the options, the numerical values are required. You cannot replace
them with text using KoBoForm. This is because your final CSV output would
be a mess with unlimited size text values. Instead, once you have your CSV
data output, you create a Key that tells you what each value means.
Using this method, if you ask the question:
What kind of fish did you see?
and changed the XML Node to read "fish", when you output the CSV and look
at it, you would see a column headed "fish", showing you the data collected
from that question.
If you had Angelfish, Dogfish, and Catfish as options in that question,
they would have values 1,2,3 and you would see that under the "fish" column
in the CSV. Each record would have some combination of those numbers,
depending on what fish were viewed.
Your point about the labels is one we have considered from a usability
perspective. It's one of those "feature vs. flaw" type questions. Allowing
the values to be edited can be problematic. The solution that is in the
works is a labeling solution, which would provide a separate key file
containing all the relevant labels for your aliases. It would tell you that
"Node A01 is for question "What kind of fish did you see?" and it would
tell you "Value 1 is for Angelfish, Value 2 is for Dogfish, Value 3 is for
Catfish." Of course, this would be in a format that you could import into
an analysis program like SPSS.
I hope that answers your questions, and that KoBo can help you with your
fish tracking.
~Neil Hendrick
KoBo Developer
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 2:56 PM, SnorkelNut <galen...@mailhaven.com>wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> I write snorkeling guides. When I visit destinations I have a 7"
> Android tablet. Instead of typing out the name of each tropical fish
> I see at each location I want to create a database of fish that I can
> look through and quickly select if I have seen them, and then have
> this list of fish names available for each location later.
> So I created a list of questions in Kobo. Using the Multiselect, I
> asked the question Angelfish, with the different types of Angelfish
> listed below. I would have as many questions as there are general
> types of fish, with all the options for those below.
> This all worked great, but when I convert the file into CSV, the
> results are just weird names and numbers. I can't see any of the fish
> names that I put in as the questions or options. I don't understand
> the value of the data if I have to lookup what each question was about
> and how the numbers relate to the answers.
> What I want is to output the list of fish for each location. Each
> location will be a new survey.
> So is Kobo the right tool for this? Can I get it to tell me the
> actual fish names instead of the number?
> The goal is to have it be formatted so that I can just copy the list
> and stick it in the guide for that location.
> Thanks for your help.
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