FAQ
The questions researchers ask.
And the answers we’d want if we were buying.
Crosstabs and tab books
What is a tab book?
The full set of crosstabs for a study: every question run against every banner
point (age, market, household and so on), with weighted bases, nets and significance letters.
In FlexTabs the tab book is live — recut it, chart it, export it, ask it questions.
Is FlexTabs cross-tabulation software?
Yes — crosstab, cross-tabulation and crosstabulation software all describe the same
thing: tables of one survey question broken by another. FlexTabs builds them from your tab
spec, weighted and significance-tested, and adds charts, exports and an AI layer on top.
Getting started
How does our study get into FlexTabs?
b³ programs and fields it. The Wincross tab spec becomes your live book
automatically — every question, banner point, and weight already mapped the day
fieldwork closes — so there is no setup and nothing to rebuild. Raw data and custom
tables are yours to build on top.
How fast is a real study?
The book exists the moment fieldwork closes — it was built from the tab spec
while the survey was still in field. The honest bottleneck becomes your banner plan,
not the software.
Do you handle weighted data?
Yes — weighted bases run through the entire book, and the toolbar says so on
every table. Significance tests run on the design-corrected base.
Analysis
How does significance testing work?
Column tests against your banner points at the confidence levels your study
specifies — set per project, anywhere from 80% to 99.9%, and usually two at once,
shown as uppercase and lowercase significance letters inside the cells. Weighted studies test on the effective base. The book arrives already tested —
there is no separate “sig run”.
Can we build our own cuts and custom tables?
Banners and filters are drag-and-drop with real AND/OR logic, and the
label writes itself — “East Canada AND Male”, not a nest of parentheses. Custom tables
let you compose exactly the view a client asks for.
The AI layer
Does the AI compute the numbers?
No — and this is the product’s spine. The engine does the math; the AI
narrates. Every AI answer and every Stories card carries a verbatim machine stat line
and a deep link to the exact table and row. The AI quotes figures; it never invents one.
What exactly is Stories?
A ranked, narrated feed of the survey’s strongest findings. It profiles
every table, scores every finding for interestingness × reliability, corrects for false
discovery (Benjamini–Hochberg, q ≤ .05), applies effect-size floors — and reports what it
deliberately did not say, instead of padding the feed.
Can our own AI stack use FlexTabs?
Yes — FlexTabs speaks MCP (early access). Point Claude,
Claude Code, or any MCP-capable agent at your workspace with a scoped API
key, and it queries the same engine the app uses — so your AI cites
weighted, sig-tested, table-traceable numbers instead of inventing them.
That’s the point of the split: the AI talks, the engine counts,
whoever’s asking.
Will it flag weak findings?
Low-base findings are flagged on the card itself, not in a footnote — and
results that are “significant” but too small to matter are held back by the effect floor.
Sharing & security
What can we export?
The whole tab book as formatted Excel (sig letters included) and the
findings as PowerPoint — charted in your theme. Nothing is retyped on the way out.
Where does our data live, and who can see it?
FlexTabs runs on Microsoft Azure. Access is organization-scoped with
user roles and permissions, secrets live in Azure Key Vault, and activity is captured in
an audit trail.
Buying
How do we start?
Book a demo. We’ll run it on a live book — tables, charts, chat,
and Stories — and answer your team’s follow-ups in the room, because
that’s the fastest way to judge it.