How to read the results spreadsheet

Respondent ID — This is an ID that we generate for each respondent when they first answer a question in the questionnaire. If you have turned the Maintain respondent session setting on, the ID will remain the same for the respondent even if they fill the questionnaire in several sessions (if browsing from the same device). The respondent ID also helps in identifying spam.

Publication ID — Every time that you publish a version of your questionnaire, it is given a publication ID. For example, if you go back to fix an error in the published questionnaire and then re-publish it, it will be given a different publication ID. This way you can always tell which version of the questionnaire the respondent has replied to.

Submitted — This is the date and time when the respondent submitted their responses by clicking the Done button. The dates and times are in the UTC (GMT+0) time zone)

First active — The date and time when the respondent first accessed the questionnaire. The dates and times are in the UTC (GMT+0) time zone)

Publication consent — This will be listed as either TRUE (=consent) or FALSE (=no consent). If you have not turned on any of the settings that ask for publication consent, consent is automatically assumed.

Language — The language that the questionnaire was taken in.

The columns that follow the essential data explained above contain the answers to your non-map-based questions. In the next section we list each question type and explain how the responses to them will be listed in the spreadsheet. For instructions on how to visualize the data in these questions, please see this article.

Choose one and Poll

Each answer option is given a value, with the first one getting the value 0, the second 1, the third 2, etc. For example, in the results for the question above, 'Woman' would be marked as 0 in the results data sheet, and therefore if the respondent has chosen '0', it means 'Woman'. The column that lists the answer chosen by the respondent is followed by a column giving the option identifier number for that answer option, and the next the label or name of that option. They are followed by columns for each of the answer options. In these, the text TRUE or FALSE is used to denote whether the respondent has (=true) or hasn't (=false) chosen that option.

This is what it looks like in the Excel spreadsheet (click the image to view a larger version):

The first column (V) shows the number of the option chosen; the second (W) the option identifier of it, the third (X) the name of that option in the survey. The following columns go through each option (1 column = 1 answer option), with FALSE = option not chosen by this respondent and TRUE = option chosen by this respondent.

Choose multiple 

Instead of using numbers, the responses are categorized as either true (=option chosen by the respondent) or false (=option not chosen by the respondent). For example, the response in the image above would be listed as [false, false, false, true, false] in the results data.

Similarly to Choose one or Poll, each answer option also has its individual column with TRUE or FALSE according to whether that option was chosen or not.

This is what it looks like in the Excel spreadsheet (click the image to view a larger version):

The first column (AF) lists all the answer options and what each respondent chose in response. The following columns go through each option (1 column = 1 answer option), with FALSE = option not chosen by this respondent and TRUE = option chosen by this respondent.

Multiple choice grid

In the first column, you will see all the responses that this respondent has given to this question, for example [0,1,3,2,-1]. The numbers stand for the answer options (from left to right), with the first option from the left being 0, the second 1, etc. -1 means that the respondent did not choose any option.

For example, if the responses to the question below are [0,1,3,2,-1], that means that the respondent cycles daily, uses a private car 1-3 times/week, never carpools, and walks 1-3 times/month, but did not respond to the final question on public transport. 

After this column, there are columns for each subquestion, always followed by a column stating the answer option that this respondent chose for that subquestion (e.g. 'Daily' to '...by bicycle'). You can edit the "option identifier" names in the response settings of each subquestion in the questionnaire editor. Please remember that you need to do this before publishing the questionnaire as changing the option identifier while data is being collected may affect the data! 

Number and open questions are simply presented as the number or text that the respondent has entered.

The range question answers are presented in brackets, e.g. [3200, 6650] for 3200-6650. The next two columns state the minimum and maximum values of this range.

The slider question responses are listed as a value. This indicates where on the scale the respondent has chosen to moved the slider. For example, if the minimum value is 0 and the maximum 100, and the response data shows 50, this means that the response is either 50 (if you asked for a number) or neutral or similar (if you asked another type of question).

File upload/Images and other files uploaded by respondents – The Excel sheet contains a link to the file(s) the respondent has uploaded.

Element Response Sheet — This spreadsheet is a directory of the map responses spreadsheets. It lists each spreadsheet containing map data and shows which question on which page they are linked to.

Map question tabs — As stated, the response data to a map question is always presented under its own tab. One tab = one map question. It includes also the response data on any follow-up or pop-up questions. The first six columns in the sheet follow the same structure as outlined above. The additional columns are:

Index — Shows the order in which the respondent placed the map markings, if they have placed several to answer the same question. E.g. 2 means that it is the second marking that the respondent has left to that question. For clickable map objects, Index shows the ID key of the object that the respondent clicked.

Wkt — The coordinates for the marking. The Wkt coordinates are compatible with for example QGIS. To export your survey data to ArcGIS, we recommend downloading the map responses as shapefiles.

The columns that follow the coordinates contain the responses related to the pop-up questions.

Clickable map objects: Just like with other types of map questions, the answers given in the clickable map object pop-up window have their own tab/sheet in the results Excel. The difference is that in a clickable map object sheet, the Index column will instead list the ID of the object. This way you can see what object was clicked by each respondent and what they answered to any questions.