In certain situations, you might want to label your survey responses for better organization and ability to filter the data later on. This labeling can be based on various criteria like the date, instructor, event, city, class, and more. Tagging your responses helps streamline the management of data.

The method of labeling responses depends on how you collect the data. You can choose to tag the responses either before or after data collection.

If you are not using unique page marking the available tagging methods is limited to two:

Without Unique Page Marking

• Create Multiple Survey Versions
• Tagging After Data Collection

With Unique Page Marking

• Set Batch Number When Generating Copies
• Set Identifier Prefix When Generating Copies
• Create Multiple Survey Versions
• Use Prefill Forms (Advanced)
• Tagging After Data Collection

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Tagging before data collection

• Works best if you use unique page marking.
• This option is not suitable for web surveys.

Tagging after data collection

• You have responses collected and scanned, now you need to upload them and tag in different groups.
• If you are not using unique page marking or your survey is 1 page long this method may be most suitable.
• Also collecting data with web surveys.

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Tagging Before Data Collection

Set Batch Number When Generating Copies

A print batch in paper surveys is a specific set of survey forms printed together and identified by a unique code or number. Setting a Batch label can help manage the distribution, collection of forms, and track responses for accurate data. If you use unique page marking, you can set the Batch label every time you generate a file for printing.

Set Identifier Prefix When Generating Copies

If you use unique page marking, every time you generate a file for printing you can set the Prefix. If no prefix is set, an incremental identifier (such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.) will be generated.

The prefix will be added to the number of each copy. For example, if you set the prefix as "ABC_" and generate 3 copies, the identifiers displayed on the bottom-left corner of the page will be "ABC_1", "ABC_2", and "ABC_3". If you generate 3 more copies with the same "ABC_" prefix, the next identifiers will be "ABC_4", "ABC_5", and "ABC_6.

Prefix can only contain letters (A-Z), underscores (_) and dashes(-).

Create Multiple Survey Versions

For relatively small tag groups, you can generate different "Survey versions" on the Print tab. Activate "Advanced Versioning" if you want to rename versions easily. Keep in mind that if you need to make future survey modifications, you'll need to recreate the versions to update them.

Use Prefill Forms (Advanced)

Prefill forms provide advanced tagging capabilities, allowing you to include multiple pieces of information about the respondent in the printed copies. This feature is more complex and suitable for advanced tagging needs.

After Data Collection

There are few ways how you could upload the responses, you can customize the tag in with most common upload methods as indicated below.

Web Upload

After scanning and preparing the data for upload, you can enter the tag for each response.

Email

When uploading scanned documents via email, you can set the tag using the +plus notation. For example, if your assigned email address is demo@upload.papersurvey.io, you can add the tag by including it before the @ character (e.g., demo+mytag@upload.papersurvey.io).

Web surveys

If you are using web surveys to collect data, you can set the tag in the URL. For example: https://www.papersurvey.io/s/52k6rk?tag=mytag.

Other Methods

Tag customization is not available when uploading via Zapier, API, Android mobile app, and default tags will be assigned accordingly (zapier, api, mobile_app).

Updating tags

If you need to update tags for specific entries, you can bulk-select the entries and update the tags for the selected responses as shown in the image above.