Read on to learn about the new Magpi web app’s features, or login right now and try out the beta. We’d love your feedback!
At Magpi we’ve spent most of 2020 like most of you: working from home, not traveling, and trying to stay sane. Happily, this allowed us to focus on a brand new version of Magpi’s web app, which has now been released in beta. This new version has been rewritten from the ground up, and so you can expect real performance enhancements when you search, sort, and export data. But we’re not just speeding up Magpi, we’re also adding some great new features that we know you will love.
Power Dashboard with Team Talk and Team Tracker Modules
Up to now, the heart of Magpi has been the form dashboard, which is basically a list of your forms and how much data you have in each.
Now, based on user feedback, we’re powering up the dashboard with real intelligence about your data activities — and making it user customizable.
What’s real intelligence?
automatic calculation of average interview duration — Know which data collectors are going way too fast (maybe sitting under a tree?), too slow (maybe some more training is needed), and who is just right. Calculated on-the-fly, automatically, for all your activities.
automatic display of data collector totals — including when the total is zero.
automatic mapping of interview locations — zoom in, zoom out, review data instantly.
automatic zoomable graphs of your data activity — focus on the most important parts.
And all of this isn’t buried 10 clicks in: it’s automatically right there when you log in, in real-time.
But we also want the dashboard to help you manage and communicate with your team, so our Team Talk module will let you send SMS or in-app messages to some or all of your team. And the Team Tracker will let you follow the data collection path of each and every team member.
Flexible, configurable dashboard modules that let you design your own dashboard.
No-Code Auto-Export for Enterprise and Pro users
Magpi users always have a need to integrate: to automatically flow their Magpi data into other software, whether that’s something simple like Google Sheets, or amazing like Microsoft Power BI, or nerdy like SQL Server. For years, Magpi’s Enterprise users have been able to do this using two methods:
(1) Magpi’s API — the most resource-intensive approach, this requires programmers
(2) Zapier — a great tool that allows our Enterprise users to create simple or complex integrations with no code. Just point and click — but you do need to create and pay for a Zapier account.
We’re happy to announce a third method:
(3) Auto-Export — with Auto-Export, users can very quickly, and with no coding, automatically and continuously export their Magpi data to Google Sheets or online Microsoft Excel (or both). It’s so easy, you’ll be amazed. No programmers, no Zapier account, no fuss. Use it to create an automatic data backup, to move data into your analytic software, to create a working copy of data for analytics — all with just a few clicks.
And we’re opening up auto-export functionality to Pro users, as well as Enterprise, making a great value.
Easy, no-code auto-export of your data. Set it and forget it!
Magpi Data Now Easily Integrates with Microsoft PowerBI
Speaking of integrations, we’ve also created a really simple way to integrate your Magpi data with Microsoft’s Power BI. Even if you haven’t heard of Power BI, you’ve seen it: it’s behind a lot of those coronavirus dashboards that we’ve all come to rely on (here’s an example). Power BI is a powerful data visualization and analysis tool, a perfect complement to Magpi’s data collection chops. This integration is actually already in place, and takes just a few minutes, so give it a try. Read more.
Chat-Based Data Collection
Our users love our SMS-based data collection tools, except for one thing: the cost per message of SMS is high — even one cent per message adds up quickly! This is why most of us now use “text chat” tools that look a lot like SMS but which send their data over the internet, not the phone system: Apple Messaging, WhatsApp, Line, Telegraph, and all the rest. These text-like chat tools have dramatically lower costs, so we’re building chat-based data collection right into Magpi, with all the strengths of our interactive SMS-based system — no app to install, works on even non-smart phones — plus low, low cost.
Data tools
Magpi was designed as a data collection tool, and data collection is still our focus. If you want to do data analysis, you’ll probably need to get your Magpi data somewhere else, whether that’s Excel or SPSS or Tableau. But based on user feedback, we’re taking the first steps towards giving our users good basic analytic tools right in the data tab. This includes super simple things like improved sorting and filtering, to higher-level stuff like pivot tables. We don’t expect this will have the Excel folks at Microsoft losing sleep, but we know it will make things just a bit easier for our users.
LOTS of other improvements
Magpi users will also notice tons of other improvements in the new app, from an audit log to white labeling to improved workflows, and more.
Login and try it out
(use your existing Magpi app credentials)
IMPORTANT: Magpi free users MUST use the new web app,
while paid users can choose to use either the old Magpi web app or the new one.
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