The authoring tools create various system variables in the questionnaire definition. System variables hold information like the status of an interview, the ID of the interviewer, the serial number of the respondent, and so on.

Generally, the serial number (called Respondent.Serial) is the only system variable that is included in a paper questionnaire. However, an option in the Load dialog in UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper enables you to suppress the serial number question from the paper questionnaire, and hence from the scanned data. However, because a unique identifier is generally required for data storage and analysis, a unique serial number is generated during the export, if there is no serial number in scanned data.

A system variable is indicated by the following icon: