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In some cases you may need to combine or break down the answer options within a question to achieve the result "groups" you require for your report. You can do this using Recoding. There are two methods of recoding a question:
- In Authoring, the questionnaire designer can recode the answer options before sending the data to Reportal for inclusion in the report. This requires that the Forsta Plus designer adds a special question to the questionnaire. This question is hidden from the respondent, and it takes the replies from the original question and collects the answers into the required groups. The Reportal designer then uses the recoded question as any other question when creating the report. This is a rather inflexible option because the Reportal designer does not have access to the original data, so can only use the recoded data.
- In Reportal, you can recode the data from the original question. This is the more flexible option because you have full access to the original data and can recode it as required for your report.
Recoding in Reportal is performed on the questions in the Data Source toolbox.
Note: When using the Extended Tabulation Engine (go to APPENDIX C: The Tabulation Engine Versions for more information) recoded variables may cause ambiguities, as category codes of the original and the new variable may be the same. Therefore, when using the extended engine, if masking and filtering by mask is applied to a recoded variable (either via the "mask" option in the variable header or via the "ignore" or "masking" options of the Categories header and similar), then Reportal always assumes that category codes specified in the mask refer to the new (recoded) categories of the variable. This may cause changes in tables in some cases when compared to the legacy engine.