What are Smart Groups

Smart Groups are very similar in look and feel to normal groups, with one important difference: instead of hardwired connections to their members, smart groups store a query to compute their virtual references whenever needed.

Although also an option for code, memo and network groups, the most common application for smart groups are smart document groups. They allow you to combine two or variables. For instance gender and location. This requires that you have document groups for the basis variables. Here for gender: male and female and for location: urban and rural. If you need the combination of gender and location more often, a good way to do this is to create smart groups:

  • female respondents from urban areas
  • female respondents from rural areas
  • male respondents from urban areas
  • male respondents from rural areas

For creating smart groups Boolean operators are used. See Available Operators for Querying Data > Boolean Operators for further information.

A reason for creating a smart group is to apply them as global filter. See Applying Global Filters For Data Analysis. Another application is to add them to a network and display document group - code connections.