SmarterSelect’s Calculation feature allows you to create formulas for auto-calculating information within an individual’s application and/or evaluation. This is a great tool for adding up evaluation scores, income and expenses, or even calculating a class rank percentage.
Before you get started, you want to be sure of two things:
- Any question that you want to include in a Calculation (i.e. questions you want to add together, etc.) must be set up as Number question types. Any question that is not set up as a Number question type cannot be included in the Calculation feature.
- You must set up a Calculation question. A Calculation question is the question you want to display the solution to your Calculation formula.
Note: Do not mark a question as Calculation if you only want it to serve as a variable in a calculation. This will prevent the answer field from becoming editable by your users.
How to create a Calculation question
- Create a new question and label as you wish. The content of the question you create will be the label for the Calculation question. It is a good idea to give a unique name for each Calculation question as you will want to be able to distinguish one from the other when you get into the Calculation page.
- Select “Number” as your question type, add whatever settings you wish, and check the box next to “Calculation”.
- Note: Select the number of decimal places you want the results of the Calculation to round to or show. ("0" will return a whole number).
- In this example, “Income Total” will be the label for this Calculation.
- Once you’ve created your Calculation question, you will see it when you go to Calculation in the navigation menu on the left.
How to Set Up the Calculation
- Click “Create this formula” to begin setting up your Calculation for this question.
- You will see a place to begin assigning Numbers questions to variables. Find the questions you want to use as the formula variables in the Application tree on the right. Drag and drop those questions into the variable fields.
- To add more variables, click the green + sign.
- To remove a variable, click the red - sign.
- Once you have assigned all of your variables, you can create your Calculation formula. Calculation will accept addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and parenthesis. You can also include constants. The order of operations applies in this feature, so parenthesis first, followed by division/multiplication, and last addition/subtraction.
- Before you can save your Calculation, you must first test. To test, enter a test value into each of the test value fields and click “Test and confirm your calculation”. Be sure that the formula you created yields the results you desire.
- If everything is correct, click the blue “Save your calculation." This will bring up an image of three cogwheels turning with a note “Updating Application Answers”. This image means that the data within the application or evaluation is being updated with the Calculation. Therefore, if you already have application data in your program and you wanted to be able to sum it up, the sums of the existing data will be there once the Calculation is saved and future data will be summed in real time, as well.
- When you have included a question in a Calculation, you will see a Calculation icon on the right.