Tailoring the Display of Questions

The way in which individual questions are displayed can be customized via the Properties Panee.

Verbatim Fields

By default, a small single line text box will display on the screen for the purpose of capturing verbatim responses. The presentation of the text box can be tailored using the Width, Height, Multi-line, Verbatim Prefix and Verbatim Suffix properties.

For questions involving a verbatim field, the width of the text input box can be set via this property. Width is specified in pixels (e.g. 500px) or as a proportion of the width of the screen (e.g. 90%).

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For questions involving a verbatim field, the height of the text input box can be set via this property. Height is specified in pixels e.g. 150px.

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For verbatim fields, Survey Shaper will display a single line text box on the screen by default. If survey respondents are expected to enter multiple lines of text in order to answer the question, check the Multi-line property to change the single line text field to a larger memo text field that will automatically expand as the respondent types in their answer.

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The Verbatim Prefix property allows you to display any text or images to the left of the text input field. Simply type the desired text into the Verbatim Prefix property field in the Properties Pane. Note: Verbatim Prefix is not available when the Multi-line property is checked.

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The Verbatim Suffix property allows you to display any text or images to the right of the text input field. Simply type the desired text into the Verbatim Suffix property field in the Properties Pane. Note: Verbatim Prefix is not available when the Multi-line property is checked.

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Multiple Response Codeframes

By default, the answer codes in a Multi Response - Checkbox question are displayed in a single column vertically on the screen. If you have a long codeframe, you may wish to instead display the answers across a number of columns, thereby minimising the survey respondent's need to scroll down the page to view all of the response options. To do this, simply enter the number of answer codes you wish to appear in each column into the Controls property field (in the Advanced section) of the Properties Pane. For example, if you have 20 answer codes, enter 'itemspercolumn=10' into the Controls field to split them into two columns, enter 'itemspercolumn=7' to split them into three columns (in this example, the third column will only have six codes).

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Slider Controls

The Controls property allows you to tailor the presentation of slider questions using optional keyword commands. Each control can be entered directly into the Controls property field, multiple controls should be separated by a comma.

By default, the Controls property field is blank. Following is an example of how a slider question appears on the screen with the default settings.

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Controls the number of decimal places, or sensitivity of the slider scale (for example, step=0.01 would make the scale sensitive to two decimal places). The default is zero decimal places.

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Displays the anchor labels / variable labels on the slider scale.

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Stops the value from appearing in the bubble on the slider scale.

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Hides the tick marks on the slider (the default is to display the left, middle and right hand side tick marks).

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Displays a non-numeric, or categorical answer, such as “Not Sure”, “Don’t Know” or “Not Applicable” as a radio button option next to the slider (the default is to display these non-numeric answers underneath the slider).

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For Slider Grid questions, displays the row labels centred above the slider scale (the default is to present the row labels to the left of the slider scale).

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Controls the start position of the bubble (for example, using startPosition=5 would position the bubble to start at value 5, which would be the midpoint on a 0 to 10 rating scale).

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Grid Questions

Allows for individual "not applicable" cells to be specified within a grid question. For any sub-question (row item), you can enter any code in the Exclude AnswerIDs property field (the codes entered should correspond to the answer codes specified in the Columns Tab for that question). In the survey, the "not applicable" cells within the grid question will be indicated by a dash, instead of a checkbox or radio button, thereby not allowing for the selection of that answer by the respondent.

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