Upload Survey Questions

We’ve made it very easy for you to create surveys by using our survey editor. However, some of you have told us that you prefer to create your surveys by writing down the questions first (physically or digitally). For all you, we are happy to announce that you can now upload survey questions to create a survey or add to an existing one.

Here’s how to do it

1. Open your favorite spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice, etc.
2. There is a specific structure that has to be followed so that we can understand your uploaded data.
   • The first line and first column in your spreadsheet has to say “surveyrock_upload” (without the quotes)
   • Every line after the first row has to start with a command token in column ‘A’ in your spreadsheet. That is a word that tells us what you want to do next and it starts and ends with two asterisks (**). The valid tokens are:
     • **page_break**
     • **comment_box**
     • **date**
     • **email**
     • **matrix**
     • **multiple_choice**
     • **nps**
     • **number**
     • **ranking**
     • **rating_scale**
     • **star**
     • **text**
     • **text_multiple**
     • **text_single**
   • In addition to the tokens mentioned above, some of the questions can have additional tokens in the same row but later columns.
     • **choices**
     • **rows**
     • **columns**
     • **choice_layout**
     • **include_other**
     • **blank**
   • Page breaks (new pages) can have a title attached or be left blank.
3. Save your spreadsheet as a .csv (comma separated values) file.
4. Create a new survey (as usual) or open an existing one. Click on Survey -> Upload Questions to upload the csv file that you just saved in step 3.

An example

So that was the theory of what you need to do. It might seem complicated but it’s really not! Now I’ll show an example, step by step.

First, I open my spreadsheet and then add these cells

A couple of comments regarding the information in the spreadsheet:

• When adding a new page (**page break**), if you want to give the page a title, enter it in column B
• When you add a question: column A is always the question type (e.g. **rating_scale**), column B is always the title, column C always shows if the question is required (y) or not (n). If your question type requires choices, rows or columns, that always comes afterwards, starting in column D.

When you’re done making the changes to your spreadsheet, save it as a .csv file.

Now, either create a new survey or edit an existing one. Click on the Survey dropdown menu on the right of the page and then Upload Questions.

Next, either drag the .csv file into the blue outlined box or else click somewhere inside the blue box, select your file and then click Open. You will see a success message and you are brought back to the survey editor page with the newly uploaded questions displayed.

For more details, please see our corresponding support page.