Notes for Quantum users
This section has been designed to help Quantum users get started with UNICOM Intelligence Professional. Quantum is a sophisticated tabulation package that enables you to manage and tabulate your survey data. For example, routine tasks that you can perform in Quantum include:
▪checking and validating survey data
▪cleaning and manipulating survey data
▪creating sophisticated schemes for weighting survey data
▪producing market research tables
▪performing statistical calculations
▪exporting data to a variety of formats for further analysis
▪generating Quanvert databases
With the exception of generating a Quanvert database, you can also perform all of these tasks using UNICOM Intelligence Professional. Although Quantum has been developed over many years and has a number of detailed features that not yet available in UNICOM Intelligence Professional, already UNICOM Intelligence Professional has a number of advantages. For example:
▪Unlike Quantum, you are not restricted to any one specific data format--UNICOM Intelligence Professional can work with data in any format for which a suitable Data Source Component (DSC) is available. In addition, UNICOM Intelligence Professional can import data directly from any data format for which you have a suitable OLE DB provider (this means that you can easily import data from Access and Excel if you have Microsoft Office installed).
▪Similarly, exporting data is easy and flexible. You can export data to any format for which a suitable Data Source Component (DSC) is available or for which you have a suitable OLE DB provider (this means that you can easily export data to Access and Excel provided you have Microsoft Office installed).
▪You can set up rule-based cleaning routines based on the variable definitions.
▪UNICOM Intelligence Professional makes working with multiple languages easy and, unlike Quantum, supports languages that use double-byte character sets (DBCS), such as many of the East Asian languages, including Japanese.
▪Publishing tables is easy and flexible. The UNICOM Intelligence Professional Tables Option comes with a number of components that make it easy to publish tables in HTML and Excel. In addition, further export components are planned for future releases and it is possible to create your own export component.
▪When you run or debug an interview, or run the interview using Auto Answer, you can choose to write the answers, also known as the Case Data, to an output format supported by the UNICOM Intelligence UNICOM Intelligence Data Model. At present, the formats you can write to are UNICOM Intelligence Data File, IBM SPSS Statistics SAV file, UNICOM Intelligence RDB database, and UNICOM Intelligence XML file. For more information, see
Creating case data.
Learning UNICOM Intelligence Professional takes time and effort, just like learning Quantum did. However, UNICOM Intelligence Professional has lots of features to help you. For example, it has a number of templates and macros that simplify setting up routine jobs. In addition, the UNICOM Intelligence Developer Documentation Library comes with numerous samples, most of which are designed to run “right out of the box” against the sample data. You can use these samples as a basis for your own jobs. In addition, because UNICOM Intelligence Professional uses industry-standard technology, the skills you develop using UNICOM Intelligence Professional will be more easy to use in other scripting and technology environments than some of your Quantum skills.
See also