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This article is part of The Definitive Guide to Importing and Preparing Data.

Organizing your variables into folders in the Variable Sidebar (the leftmost part of the Crunch interface) is an important and useful first step in setting up a clean and tidy dataset.

Note: If you haven't already, it is strongly recommended that you read Recommendations for setting up a clean and tidy dataset.

Two primary benefits are:

• Putting variables into folders that represent questionnaire section breaks helps researchers and data processing team members quickly find survey questions/variables.
• Moving source variables into the "Hidden" folder means you do not clutter the sidebar with variables that are not needed for analysis (e.g., once you have created a categorical array or multiple response variable from individual variables, those no longer need to be shown in the sidebar). Likewise, it may not be useful to display the respondent ID or other system/quality control variables.

In the web app

1. Click the dataset name in the top left of the header bar.
2. Select Organize variables from the drop-down menu.
3. On this screen, variables are listed in their current order, along with their descriptions and aliases. You can create new folders and drag and drop variables into those folders or drag and drop to sort variables in their current folder.
   • See the Organizing Variables article for more information on all that you can do on this menu, including how to hide variables from the sidebar.
   

   You can also click the Download structure link that appears on the lower right of this screen to download a Crunch Automation script that defines the current folder structure:

   

Note: You will need to have Editor permissions and may need to unlock the dataset using the icon on the top right of the header bar to have editing permissions for the dataset.

Crunch Automation

• ORGANIZE command

As this is a very common task when setting up a dataset, you may wish to use the Script Builder to help generate the Crunch Automation script more efficiently. You can also use the Download structure link from the web app (as noted above) to access the script for the current folder configuration.

Using R

• Variable Folders and Organization - R vignette