Did you know that despite of technological changes in recent years, the paper still remains as one of the most used mediums to collect data from surveys?. If you previously had conducted surveys in paper, you know that this process requires time and effort, and there is always the possibility of human errors. This is because the process of a survey tends to be complex, and it is frequent to make changes to the instrument constantly, even after it is sent to the field; such as adding or removing questions or adding options to the list of responses, etc. This situation gets even more complicated when there are tight deadlines or when you are using inappropriate tools such as spreadsheets, Excel, SPSS or others that do not allow the flexibility required.

Paper has several advantages over other methods, especially in regions like Africa or Latin America, where the Internet services are not as reliable as they are in the USA or Europe. The paper is versatile, inexpensive and the information gathered takes less risk than those gathered using mobile devices. No special knowledge or trainning is required; anyone is able to apply a PAPI questionnaire. Additionally to these benefits, different studies have demonstrated that respondents of face-to-face paper and pencil questionnaires feel more confident (less threatened) than those surveyed with electronic devices.

The general concern of researchers, managers and users of paper surveys in general is probably how to eliminate the common problems associated with its planning and management, and at the same time, how to make sure that the quality and efficiency of the survey is optimal in all stages of the survey process. To answer these questions, Rotator have proposed a simple but powerful sequential method that guides the researcher step by step in the creation, processing and managing of the survey. Rotator remains as one of few solutions available to process questionnaires on paper nowdays. Thus providing a simple but powerful methodological framework to make the PAPI processing more efficient, realiable and faster than ever before.

With RotatorSurveys you can create a paper questionnaires, collect responses and analyze the data from scratch. It's perfect for those users who run fast surveys that need to be applied on paper. In spite that our software does not support scanner, the manual data entry module for transcribing responses is fast, easy and very reliable.

There are very few existing solutions on the market to transcribe or process surveys from paper, this situation is because software companies have focused its vision on Web surveys, thus creating a need for modern software applications that allow to process surveys in paper. In this sense, and in spite that Rotator tries to address all forms of data collection methods, we are aware that paper still remains as a valid medium to be used in surveys that require face-to-face interaction. Rotator is, and will be an application that allows the collection of data from paper questionnaires as well as other methods used in modern surveys. An application that allows to capture data from paper, or an application that allow to transcribe survey data gathered from paper must be fast, secure, reliable, easy-to-use and must also guarantee the safety of the data.

With Rotator you can perform the processing of surveys in a collaborative way. Concurrent users can perform data loading, classification of texts or analyze data in a transparent, reliable and fast way. Rotator applications can operate on a local area network (LAN) or they can be virtualized by using Terminal Servers, or any other application virtualization system, thus allowing hundreds of users to access the survey locally or from remote locations.