Help Center
Topic: Prefill data
Pre-filling and merging PDF forms with dynamic survey data
Help Center Prefill data • Last updated: 14 December, 2019Would you like to go another step further and generate dynamically changing forms based on the data in your spreadsheet?
Pre-fill Forms
If you would like to customize and dynamically generate each form to pre-fill certain fields in your survey, you can do this with the Prefill Forms feature.
It allows you to automatically insert text in Short text, Long Text, Number question types.
Potential use cases include:
- Automatically insert event names and dates in surveys
- Inserting dynamic information such as client id, person name
How can I use it?
- You create a new "dataset" and upload an Excel/CSV spreadsheet with your data from Prefill Forms page.
- The columns in the spreadsheet should be named similarly as the column-field matching is performed based on question/column name similarity.
- Columns in the spreadsheet with be automatically matched with the questions.
- e.g. Data for question 'Type event name you are attending?' would be taken from dataset column 'event name'.
- Select rows you would like to print and select a survey you would like to use.
- You may select few surveys and we will randomly pick one.
- The generated dynamic forms will be sent to your email.
Dynamic text replacement with variables
Another way to dynamically generate a survey form is by automatically replacing the text in the survey. With the text replacement, you can save more space and make it look more aesthetically pleasing.
Spreadsheet column name | Dynamic variable name to be used in the survey |
---|---|
name | {{name}} |
location | {{location}} |
date | {{date}} |
school name | {{school name}} |
Example
For example, you may create a survey question such as: "Thanks for visiting {{location}} on {{date}}. Would you mind answering..."
Using Prefill Forms you may upload a spreadsheet that e.g. contains location
and date
columns:
ID | location | DATE |
---|---|---|
123 | XYZ restaurant | 2019-01-01 |
124 | ABC Exhibition | 2019-02-01 |
The printed survey forms will have this text dynamically replaced:
- Thanks for visiting XYZ restaurant on 2019-01-01. Would you mind answering...
- Thanks for visiting ABC Exhibition on 2019-02-01. Would you mind answering...
Things to keep in mind:
- You should keep the dynamic text short - Do not add large chunks of text that would change the page layout as checkmark and textbox elements must remain where they were originally.
- If the layout shifts, the checkmarks will not be recognized correctly.
- If you would like to add large chunk of text, it is recommended to place it in the footer - it will not affect the survey layout.
Survey Form identifiers
We highly recommend providing your unique identifier. This way you will be able to match the responses with your internal database or spreadsheet after the data collection.
Survey Copies
You may have noticed the ability to specify a number of copies (see image above) and might have wondered why is it here.
This is useful in cases where you would like to generate multiple duplicate copies, e.g.
- 50 copies with the
location
of "XYZ restaurant" - 50 copies with the
location
of "ABC Exhibition".
Note: When the number of copies is more than 1, you will not be able to customize the survey form identifier.
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