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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation: User Guide > Project definition > Project definition shortcuts > Text updates |
There are two methods for making repeated text changes:
Text can be changed globally by selecting the relevant entries and using Text find and replace.
The search can be a simple piece of text or you can use a regular expression. Regular expressions are a standard, powerful way to select and change particular parts of text. A full description of regular expressions can be found on the web or in technical books.
You can restrict the text replacement to particular types of text: questions, instructions, responses and so on.
From the [Project] menu you can [Output all entry texts to file] to create a CSV file of all the text in the project.
The text list is sorted and all the duplicates are removed. This gives a list of all the unique texts used in the project which can be checked for spelling and grammar errors.
The output actually puts out the texts twice, in two columns side by side. If you open the file with a spreadsheet program (Excel) you can spell check the second column and correct any errors. This updated file can then be used to update all the changed texts in the project
For example, if the text "Don't know" has been incorrectly entered as "Dot know" on the last response of a bank of rating scales it will appear in the list once as:
15 Response Dot know Dot know
The 15 means that this text appears 15 times as the response text in the project. You can change this row to be:
15 Response Dot know Don't know
If you use this changed file to [Update all entry texts using file] then all the responses with "Dot know" will be changed to "Don't know". All faulty texts can be fixed at the same time in one update. Any rows where the second text has not been changed will obviously not be altered.
If you need a copy of a project in a different language you can use the [Project] menu:
1.Copy the project master file
2.Output all entry texts to file
3.Update the second column to be the new language equivalent
4.Update all entry texts using file in the new master file
This is a very safe method because the master file is not changed by hand; all the changes are done in the spreadsheet file.
It is also very efficient because each text is only translated once.