Week Four: Practical Lessons

This week I learned two practical lessons in the world of market research: survey programming and dashboard creation.

Once the survey that I was working on with another intern was complete, one of the men from the office taught us how to use Qualtrics to program the survey to be an interactive questionnaire rather than a multiple choice Word document.  It is a fairly straight-forward process, but it forces you to think about how you want your survey to appear to someone who is taking it.  Do you want to force them to answer a question?  Do you want them to choose multiple answers?  How many?  If they aren't a college student do you want to ask them what college they attend?  It's a very logical process, and I enjoyed it.  Once the survey was programmed, we tested it a few times to look for mistakes and make corrections, and it will hopefully be in the field later this week.

As an office we learned from one of our co-workers how to make dashboards for client reports.  Dashboards are interactive Excel spreadsheets that utilize pivot tables to present the data that we find in a visually appealing and easy to use way for clients.  I had never used pivot tables before, but they are a great way to summarize a large data set.  From the pivot tables you then use the VLookUp formula to create graphs and slicers to make the dashboard interactive. 

During the dashboard lessons we discussed the merits of using Microsoft Powerpoint vs. Microsoft Excel in reports.  While Powerpoint used to be the go to program to use (and still is, depending on the kind of report), new formatting options in Excel are making a more viable option due to its interactive potential.

I have learned countless lessons through this internship already, and this week I have learned many practical skills that I can use in school and business in the future.