Analysing my CSV data

[downstage]

Hiya,

I have to analyse some survey results that have been stored as .csv files,
and I've only ever used very basic Excel functions before.

Where a question allowed multiple results, I need a way to count and sort
the given answers. Is there a way to get the comma separated results entered
into separate cells, without doing it manually? Or is it going to be too
complicated for an Excel beginner, and would be easier to do it the long way?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

 

[David Biddulph]

If your results are comma separated in a csv file, Excel will separate them
into different cells.
If you have an Excel file with variables comma separated within a cell, then
you can use Data/ Text to Columns to separate them.
Excel will tend to try to decide on the interpretation of the format of the
data for you, so you may need to force it to what you need (perhaps to text
format). If you look at the archives of this group you will see many
discussions on the subject, but if you have specific problems, come back to
us with more detail.

 

[downstage]

The results are in a csv file.

There are 116 participants and Excel puts each of their answers is in a
different cell - so far so good, and I've been able to do lots of the
analysis from that. The problem arises where a single survey question allows
the user to select multiple answers, and therefore you get multiple values
(usually text values) entered into one field. Sorry if I didn't make this
clear before.

So in one cell (one question answer from one participant), I'll have x; y ;z
(in my survey I think there's up to about 14 answers in any one cell). These
will not always be in alphabetical order which means when I click to sort, I
still can't easily count. I can scan through each cell to find whether it
does or does not contain a particular item but this seems extremely long
winded!

Does this explain the issue a little better?

 

[David Biddulph]

If you have x; y ;z in one cell you can use Data/ Text to Columns to
separate them, using the "delimited" option, with semi-colon as the
delimiter.