Jonathan Stark

One of my Quick Question clients was wondering how to set up a cross tab report for her chimp tracking database. Yes, you read that right; she tracks chimps for a living.

Here are some excerpts from her original email:

So, I study wild female chimps. What I will need to do is summarize certain things about each day. For example: On 7/13/09, Binoche spent 3 hours feeding, was beaten 4 times by males, etc.

One of the things I am particularly interested in is copulations. I record whenever those happen and some specific information about each one.

And my personal fave:

In addition to my behavioral database, I also have a urine database containing hormone information from urine samples I collected in the field. But I want to make sure I have my behavior set up correctly before I move to the urine.

I love my job.

Anyway, I sent her an example file with three tables: Chimp, Action, and Follow. Chimp just stores the chimp names with a chimp id. Action has the id of the chimp performing the action, the type of action (eating or drinking, in this case), and when the action started and stopped. The Follow table contains per day per chimp summary information, and breaks out duration and count by action type and totals. Nothing earth shattering here, but it can be tricky if you don’t know how to do it. It’s nothing fancy, but you can download the sample file if you want to check it out.