EPI INFO

Epi Info™ is a public domain of interoperable suite of software tools designed for the global
community of public health practitioners. It allows the easy creation of electronic forms
(questionnaires), rapid data entry into those forms, and analysis of the data with epidemiologic
statistics, maps, and graphs. Since 1985, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
has been developing and maintaining Epi Info™.

MEDICAL APPLICATIONS OF EPI INFO

In the medical field Epi Info can:
❖ Play a key role in disease outbreak investigations
❖ Help in the development of small to mid-sized disease surveillance systems; as analysis,
visualization, and reporting (AVR) components of larger systems.
❖ Be used as an education tool in the science of epidemiology and public health analytic
methods in public health institutions.

GENERAL APPLICATIONS OF EPI INFO

The main application/features of Epi Info include:
❖ Rapid questionnaire design,
❖ Data entry and validation,
❖ Data analysis including mapping, graphing and creation of reports.

To collect data, first create a data entry form. Then create the said questionnaire using the Form
Designer module. The Form Designer is accessed through the Epi Info™ 7 menu.

You can open the menu by clicking on the Epi Info™ icon on your desktop.

Forms in Epi Info™ 7 consist of one or more pages. Each page may have one or more fields.
There is no limit to the number of pages or fields on an Epi Info™ 7 form.

OPENING THE FORM DESIGNER

1. Navigate to the desktop.

2. Double-click on the Launch Epi Info™ shortcut. The Epi Info™ 7 menu will appear.

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 Figure: The Epi Info™ 7 menu.
3. To create a simple data entry form, click the Create Forms button and a Form Designer
will appear

CREATING YOUR PROJECT (QUESTIONAIRE)

After opening the form designer, you’ll notice that many of the options are grayed out. These
options are disabled because you have not created a new Epi Info™ project or opened an
existing project for editing.

Before you can begin adding questions to the questionnaire, first create a new project:

1. From the toolbar, click the New Project button. The New Project window will appear.
2. In the Name field, fill the name of your project (e.g. E.Coli-Sample 2012). This will
become the project’s name.
3. In the Form Name field, type the appropriate name (e.g. Food History). This will become
the name of the first form contained within the project.
4. Click OK. After several seconds, the project is created and a blank canvas will appear in
the Form Designer window.

CREATING FIELDS

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 1. ADD A TEXT FIELD

Every time you create a new project, a default form is added to it. In the steps you completed
above, this default form was called Food History and is being displayed in the Form Designer
window, ready to be edited. The next steps, outlined below, add fields to the form.

You can begin by adding a Text field.

1. With the Food History form loaded, right click on the canvas. A pop-up menu will
appear.

Figure 2: The pop-up menu when right-clicking on the canvas.

2. Move the mouse over the New Field option. A sub-menu will appear.
3. From the list of choices, select Text. A Text dialog will appear.

With a text field, you can type in whatever values you want. This makes them unsuitable for
collecting certain types of data (e.g., a patient’s age or temperature at the time of the interview).

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A numeric field ensures that only valid numbers are accepted, which can be helpful later during
analysis if you want to generate a mean, median, mode, min/max values, etc.

Notice that the Field Definition window for the numeric field was different than it was for the
text field. The text field did not include options to set a range or define any kind of pattern. Each
field type has its own distinctive set of options available for customizing the field’s appearance
and behavior.

Some of the more commonly-seen properties include:

1. Range - Allows the designer to specify upper and lower values for the field. Any data
falling outside of the upper and lower boundaries of the range property will be discarded.
2. Required - Must be filled in before the record can be saved.
3. Read only - May not be modified by the user. It is generally useful only to more
advanced users.

Text and Numeric field types allow you to enter open-ended data and may not always be useful
in all scenarios. If we want to collect data on whether the patient was ill, we could use a
checkbox field instead. A checkbox is either checked or unchecked and can never be set to any
other value. It is well-suited for questions where the only answers are either yes or no.

Yes/No fields are best suited for one very important for when the answer is only 0ne of two
cases, i.e. Yes or No.
ADDING A DROP-DOWN LIST OF VALUES

The Yes/No field is an excellent choice for questions where the only possible values are yes, no,
and unknown. What if we want to present a drop-down list of choices to the user, where we have
defined our own list of possible values? Epi Info 7 provides three field types with which to do
this: Legal Values, Comment Legal, and Codes.

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OTHER FEATURES

Assuming you didn’t actually mean to align the fields now, Epi Info™ 7 provides a way to undo
your most recent changes.

1. Press CTRL+Z on the keyboard.

2. Or press the Undo button on the toolbar.

If you decide that you want to redo an action that you previously un-did, you can use the redo
option.

1. Press CTRL+Y.
2. Or press the Redo button on the toolbar.

Sometimes, a single page is not nearly enough space to hold all of the fields for a single survey.
You can quickly add or insert pages if you need additional space.

You can navigate back and forth between pages by clicking on the page name in the Project
Explorer. A page can be deleted by right-clicking on it and selecting Delete Page.

Some fields (i.e., Name, Age, Date of Birth, Address), may be fairly common among various
forms that you design. Epi Info™ 7 includes a feature by which you can save one or more fields
as a template to re-use those fields in other forms.

We probably want to place a heading or title on our questionnaire to make it obvious what it is
the questionnaire is for. Titles can be added by creating a label field. Unlike the other fields
we’ve created, label fields do not store any data and exist for display purposes only. Follow the
steps below to add a title to the top of the questionnaire:

The tab order refers to the order in which the cursor visits each field on a page as the Tab key is
pressed.

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Having a tab order that does not follow the logical order of entry will make entering data
cumbersome. However, the data entry person can override the tab order at any time by using the
mouse. Epi Info™ 7 has several built-in options for managing the tab order which will be
discussed below.

ADDING INTELLIGENCE TO FORMS – CHECK CODE

Check Code is a set of rules for the person entering data to follow, it helps validate data entry
and allows data to be entered faster and more accurately. With advance planning, code can be
created to do calculations, skip questions based on prior answers, prompt the user with dialog
boxes, and populate fields.

DATA ENTERY
Opening the Data Entry Module
Data entry in Epi Info™ 7 is fairly straightforward. Like the Form Designer, it is a distinct
module that we’ll need to open in order to use. Thankfully, the Form Designer makes it very
easy to go straight to data entry mode after creating the questionnaire.

When you open the created questionnaire, you will observe a main panel, or canvas, which
shows the crated fields in the questionnaire, while the left-hand side of the window shows you a
list of pages that exist for this particular form.

The key difference is that you can now enter data into the fields you created. Buttons at the top
of the screen allow you to navigate forwards and backwards through the records. Find the feature
to search for existing records, select New Record button for manually creating new records, this
will serve a store for all the questionnaires filled in your work.
When answering the questionnaire, you will observe that:

The text field only accepts text format

The Gender, will only recognize the genders previously selected when creating the questionnaire
forms. (i.e. in case, only Male and Female were selected as the choice gender, only them will be
accepted)

For the Yes/No field, you can only select either Yes or No from the drop-down list of choices,
however, you can leave the Yes/No field blank, which represents an unknown or missing
response.

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The checkbox field if t starts off unchecked, or false. You can check the checkbox to give it a
value of true, but you can never clear its value. It’s always either true or false.

The Numeric field only accepts numbers.

To move from one field to another, use the mouse or press the Tab key. If you press Tab while
you’re on the last field on a page, enter will automatically advance to the next page. If you’re on
the last field of the last page, then Tab will advance you to page 1 of a new record.

Additionally, any page in the form can be loaded by clicking on it in the Pages panel on the left-
hand side of the screen.

GEOCODING ADDRESSES INTO LATITUTE/LONGITUDE

Take note of the Get Coordinates button and the latitude and longitude fields. If you are
connected to the Internet, Epi Info™ 7 can turn a street address into latitude and longitude.

Figure: The E. Coli sample questionnaire.

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If you look at the top of the Enter window, you’ll we’re on record 1 of 359. This provides a
much larger set of records. To show a basic line listing:

1. Click on the down arrow next to the Line Listing button on the Enter toolbar. A list of
line listing options should appear.
2. From the list of choices, select Printable (HTML). An HTML line listing should appear
in the operating system’s default web browser.

Keep the E. Coli sample case form open for part four, data analysis.

From the Enter toolbar, click the Print button to produce a paper copy of your form.

DATA INTERPRETATION WITH EPI INFO

Classic interpretation or analysis manipulation, manages, and analyzes data. It acts as a statistics
toolbox providing many ways to transform data and perform statistical classic analysis. Data can
be sorted, listed or manipulated with a series of commands, functions, and operators. Available
statistic includes frequencies, mean and more advanced processes.
Classic analysis can be accessed by clicking classic from the Epi info main window or by
selecting Tool> Analyze data>Classic.
It reads data files created in form Designer and other types of database (e.g. MS Access, MS
Excel, SQL Server, and ASCII).
Classic Analysis can also produce graphs to present graphic representation of data
Classic analysis provides access to existing data directly or through forms created in Form
Designer.
It reads forms, file and table created in Epi info 7, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, SQL
Server, and ASCII
Translation of Epi info 7 program, help files, and exercises into non-English languages is
formulated by placing the translated phrase of all English phrases used in the programs in an MS
Access. MDB data

SOME SHORT COMINGS OF EPI INFO

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 -Runs under windows only;
It means that the operating system or platform that the program runs or can be executed only in
windows operating system (runtime environment or software frame work).
- Can be difficult to learn
It has difficult features that make it difficult to understand and interpret that is it requires a lot of
understanding of the program
- Limited analysis options beyond the basic methods
That is to say that epi info has few options when it comes to analyzing data or tool that can better
the quality of the soft ware
- Graphic can look quite sloppy and are difficult to scale (export for publication or
presentation)
- No security models

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