Forum Discussion
Jayqwellen
Jul 30, 2021Copper Contributor
Reverse scoring
Hi, Is there an automatic way to reverse score?
I know the equation but it is slow and clumsy when you have multiple columns to reverse score.
Thanks.
2 Replies
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- DAColledgeCopper Contributor
Hi Jayqwellen ,
Sorry I'm a little late to the party but thought I'd chime in since others may encounter a similar problem.
I managed a quick-fix reverse score on a four-point Likert scale over 10 columns of 5000+ rows by:
- Highlighting all columns containing the data to be reversed
- Hitting CTRL+H to bring up the REPLACE function
- Replacing 1 with 10, 2 with 20, 3 with 30, 4 with 40
- Replacing 40 with 1, 30 with 2, 20 with 3, 10 with 4
Note I didn't just replace 1 with 4 off the bat since this would have conflated my newly-reversed 4s with my existing 4s, and the same for my newly-reversed 3s. Using 10s, 20s etc provided a quick code to sidestep this problem.
Best,
DC
- mathetesSilver Contributor
I don't know if others know what you mean by "reverse score"--I googled the term in order to learn, even found a YouTube video with one solution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oeP7gdCKLs
That video contains a solution with nested IF statements that I found a bit clunky, frankly. So IF that's the formula you know, I have a suggestion for a better way...but why don't you help me (and others) help you by giving a more complete description here?
- Are you working with the five-point scale or something else?
- What's the equation/formula that you know and are rejecting because of the volume of your data?
Personally, if you just want a suggestion or two, I think I would avoid the nested IFs in favor of either
- using VLOOKUP to retrieve the "reverse score" from a table (or one of the other methods of looking up a value and retrieving some other; XLOOKUP, INDEX & MATCH)
- using CHOOSE, unless you need to allow for 0 or N/A, in which case back to VLOOKUP
In any event, I don't think there's an "automatic" wand you can wave, somehow avoiding a formula or function of some kind.