Sharing a questionnaire

Survey Solutions Designer tool allows collaborative use of a questionnaire document by multiple users.

The modes of sharing:

• Edit means that the collaborator will be able to make changes to the questionnaire: add or remove questions, sections, options, revise logic and any other changes to the questionnaire. Any user that have edit mode access to a questionnaire may share a questionnaire further with another user.

• View means that the collaborator will be able to view the questionnaire contents, but not be able to modify it. They also don’t see and may not leave Designer comments.

  January 15, 2024

Anonymous questionnaire access

A Survey Solutions questionnaire is an electronic document that outlines the structure and the content of the survey and logical relationships between its elements, such as conditional question skips, validation rules, repetitions, etc. The work on development of a good quality questionnaire often spans several weeks if not months and involves multiple persons. Some of them will be working as objective setters, some will be implementers, some will do testing and quality control, and it can be taken as granted that there will be multiple revisions, improvements and changes over the course of its development.

Registration and Signing In

You do not need to install anything on your computer to start creating questionnaires in Survey Solutions. Questionnaire Designer is an online tool, which can be reached at https://designer.mysurvey.solutions/.

To log in for the first time, you need to create an account. 

To create an account:

1. Click on the Register link and complete the form displayed.
2. Check the email account that you used for registration. Open the confirmation email from admin@mysurvey.solutions, and click on the complete registration link.

After signing in with your Questionnaire Designer credentials, you will be directed to the My Questionnaires tab, which lists all the questionnaires created by you.

Recent Changes to the Questionnaire

To see the record of all recent changes made to the questionnaire, click on the History button located on the top right of the page. This page will list the question that was changed along with the username of the person who made the change, and the timestamp for when the change was done.

The Action button allows access to the menu with the following choices:

• View - open the questionnaire in the state corresponding to this revision. You can inspect the design of the questionnaire and even test it if necessary to verify what was the appearance and behavior at this specific revision. When you view an earlier revision, it shows you the questionnaire in the read-only mode. With that you can verify the structure and syntax used in an earlier version, but can’t do any changes. Yet, there is a ‘SAVE AS’ button in the view mode that allows creating a copy of the questionnare if you need it for edits (with the same result as ’extract at revision’ below).
• Revert to this version - revert all the changes (made by all the collaborators) after this questionnaire revision.
• Extract at revision - create a copy of the questionnaire corresponding to a specific revision (current questionnaire is not affected).
• Leave a comment - leave a descriptive comment to the specific revision indicating useful information either about a particular edit event, or cumulatively for multiple edits.

Some of the items may be missing in the menu, depending on your access level to the questionnaire and recency of the recorded change event.

Find and Replace

In this article you will lean how to use the search, and find and replace features in Designer. These features are particularly useful when making systematic changes to your questionnaire.
 

Search

 
To search within a section,

1. Click the search icon (or press Ctrl + F).

   

2. Enter a text in the search box that appears.

   

To search within the entire questionnaire (including conditions),

1. Click the search icon (or press Ctrl + F).

   November 4, 2016

PDF Export

The PDF file of the questionnaire provides a convenient overview of the whole questionnaire, detailed presentation of the options, conditions and instructions with a smart trimming of long texts and options’ sets.

The exported document includes the attachments (images) and a convenient legend page explaining various elements of the preview.

To export as a PDF, click on the Export as PDF button under the Action menu button.

If you have a multilingual questionnaire, it will ask you to choose a language.

Compile

To check the questionnaire for errors and system warnings, click on the Compile button located below the questionnaire name. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + B to compile the questionnaire. If no errors and warnings are found, a green text OK will display. 

If no errors are found, but system warnings are present click on the blue Warning link to see a list of system generated recommendations for your questionnaire. 

Questionnaire Settings

To update the settings of the questionnaire, click on the Settings button located at the top right of the page.

The settings of a questionnaire contain these parameters:

• Questionnaire name - a visible (human-readable) name of the questionnaire, and
• Questionnaire variable - a name that will be assigned to the main data file when this questionnaire is exported.
• Hide element when it is disabled - a flag that enforces all disabled elements in the questionnaire to be hidden when disabled regardless of their individual visibility settings (hide-if-disabled flag).

The questionnaire name may be in any language and contain multiple words, though it is still a good idea to keep it short.

Questionnaire Edit Screen

The main components of the Questionnaire Designer edit screen are: 

1. Settings. Enables you to add and edit collaborator privileges, alter the questionnaire name, and enable or disable the availability of the questionnaire in the public repository of questionnaires in Questionnaire Designer.  
2. History. Keeps the record of all recent changes made to the questionnaire, with the corresponding username and timestamp
3. Test, provides access to the online questionnaire Tester.
4. Compile. Checks the questionnaire for errors, and provides a list of errors with the corresponding links to their location in the questionnaire.
5. Advanced Instrument Panel.Provides access to the table of contents, questionnaire description, translations, macros, lookup tables, attachments, and comments within the questionnaire. 

Questionnaire Designer Homepage

The Questionnaire Designer home page will appear after you login. This page consists of:

1. ​My Questionnaires. Lists all of your questionnaires (both those that you have created and those that have been shared with you). Click on the name of the questionnaire to open and edit it.

2. Public Questionnaires. Provides access to a number of exemplary questionnaires and tutorials. 

3. Create New. Used to create new questionnaires. 

   June 14, 2016