By default, the Provider returns the categories of categorical variables to third-party applications as strings. For example, querying a single response categorical variable Gender returns "{1}" for male and "{2}" for female. Similarly, querying a multiple response variable Newspapers might return "{1,3,8}" (for example, indicating that the respondent reads the Washington Post = 1, the New York Times = 3, and USA Today = 8).

Returning categories as strings to applications like SPSS or Excel may not, however, be particularly useful to you. Fortunately the UNICOM Intelligence Data Model provides operators and functions that work on categorical variables that allow you to return data in a way that is most useful for your analysis needs. For example, by specifying the Provider initialization option to return names instead of values the result of querying Gender would be to return rows with {Male} and {Female} instead of {1} and {2}. (To specify this option, select Return data as category names on the Advanced tab in the Data Link Properties dialog box.) To use special categorical operators and functions in the UNICOM Intelligence Data Model, you might need to edit the raw SQL generated by the ODBC wizards.