Question nesting in mTAB

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For quite some time, mTAB has supported the ability to Layer an additional question or multiple studies within the Rows or Columns of your existing tab. It has also provided the ability for this extra information to be shown as worksheets if desired, similar to an Excel workbook.


Sometimes though, it may be useful to take a number of variables and layer them one inside the other, to show a detailed breakdown of the data. This is known as Nesting. A typical example of where this may be useful is where you wish to break down your data by Make, Model, Trim or Month purchased and for all valid combinations of these variables, discover the value of certain metrics.


The best way to illustrate how mTAB is through the use of an example. If you have a tab set up such as:

Other question-nesting-in-mTAB example.jpg

Instead of running it using the normal run button, you can now go to the File menu, where you will find an option labeled Export Nest.

Other question-nesting-in-mTAB export-nest.jpg

Clicking on this option brings up a dialog, allowing the user to select the type of data that they wish to have included in their exported file. Through the use of the Main and Options panels, the user can select the Row Format, how the Nest %'s should be calculated, multi-response options and whether or not to include subtotals and empty responses.

Other question-nesting-in-mTAB dialog-main.jpg Other question-nesting-in-mTAB dialog-options.jpg

Once all of these decisions have been made, clicking OK will allow the user to provide a name and location to save the resulting XML file that will be created. Opening the file for the above example looks like this:

Other question-nesting-in-mTAB exported-file.jpg

As seen here, The Month, Brand and Model questions are neatly nested within each other. The columns have the various metrics that we selected, allowing us to see the Overall Opinion and Average Styling Rating for each row in this case.