MarketSight 7.3 reviewed

The transformation that MarketSight has gone through since we last reviewed this web-based cross-tab tool two and a half years ago is a bit like getting a visit from the son of a friend who was a teenager the last time you saw him, and is now a confident and capable adult with a university degree who wants to come and work for you.

Back then, MarketSight was a simple end-user tab tool with a few nice touches but quite a lot of limitations too. Though it was provided as a self-drive tool, it really relied on purchasing some consulting time in the background to get surveys set up or to carry out the kinds of transformations you were likely to need on the data. Then, the product was developed and marketed by a division of the Monitor Group, a large business consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This provenance showed in the kinds of features the software had or, more importantly, did not have. It was very SPSS-like in its approach to tables and lacked support for filters and even multiple-response data.

Since then, Monitor Group has spun off the original MarketSight team, which now owns and develops the software independently. Development is now strictly MR-focused and the result is a much more research-based approach to data analysis. At heart it remains an easy to use cross-tabbing tool but with a new drag-and-drop interface. You can build reports and save them for re-use later, or if someone else has set up the report for you, you can simply open the tool and review the reports.

Gone are the irritations about not being able to define or apply filters, or create tabs with multiple response data: they are all in place now. You can also drag as many variables as you like into the rows and the columns of the table.

Charting has been integrated with the tables in a very practical way. Each one-by-one combination of variables in the cross-tab is presented in the output display with its own histogram icon. Click and a window opens to display the data graphically in a way that makes any interesting variations immediately obvious to any lay user. A further button lets you tailor the chart, print it or export it.

There is better-than-typical support for ranking or sorting of answers in cross-tabs, and you can rank by any column, by the base or the mean. An arrow icon highlights which column has been used for ranking. Charts too are easily ranked.

You can also export whole groups of tables as charts, and post them directly to PowerPoint or Excel. Within Excel, the program will helpfully provide you with a tabbed worksheet containing the chart and another containing the table – and both look extremely presentable without any tweaking, which in my experience is an accomplishment in itself. The program will not produce a completely presentation-ready PowerPoint deck, but it will get you very close to it.

Other strong areas within the product are the creation of calculated variables and categories to combine variables or categories or break numbers into ranges, and a powerful way for end-users to create very similar transformations on a lot of variables, such as adding a top-two box to a rating scale. It means that researchers or end-users can be very self-sufficient and avoid the need to keep going to their DP supplier. Whole sets of analyses can be copied from one dataset to another.

A big breakthrough is the importing: anyone can upload their own data and variables, if they have either a SAV file or a Triple-S data and metadata file – which means you can load in data for a very wide range of survey data collection tools. My only grumble is that, while it imports all the text, it does not import the variable names, and that can make identifying questions difficult in many surveys.

MarketSight is still a bit prescriptive in what it will allow you to present in a table, which could frustrate the power-user. It also lacks the means to examine cases individually, to check outliers or view verbatims. It does not handle duplicated datasets or files and reports saved from multiple users as well as it should – unaided, your report libraries could descend into chaos. Plus, it currently only works in a Windows environment, under IE6 or IE7, which is not everyone’s browser of choice – though this is planned to change.

If you pay a bit more and get the enterprise edition, you also get a portal environment in which you can upload other files relating to a project and use it to start building your own research library. The system also contains a full permission control system, so that different users can be given different access rights to surveys and also to have functionality turned on or off. It therefore makes the program an attractive proposition for research agencies wishing to provide a data portal to their clients.

MarketSight’s developers deserve praise for providing users with a wealth of online help, tips, tutorials and advice all through the product. It makes this web-based tool feel like a cross between a program and a website. And what could be more appropriate for a product focused on providing information?