Survey templates allow users to customise the appearance of their surveys for program activities or business groups, or even just for their organisation in general. It is possible to have as many templates as are necessary, and users can control the presentation of the header and footer content; and all other major elements of the survey, such as questions; labels; sections; layouts and so on. Survey Templates are accessed via the Surveys main menu item.
The Survey Templates page allows users to see all of the templates in their system, as well as create a new template if desired. Select the Create link to create a new template.
The next step is to give the new template a Name, and then the first elements to be defined are the Header and Footer. The rich text editor can be used to style content in the Header and Footer sections. It is a good idea to insert a table to help layout images and text within the header and footer. If the table width is set to 100%, then it will span the survey nicely. The Table button and the Image button have been highlighted in the editor’s toolbar in the image below. If you hold your mouse over the toolbar buttons, you can use the tooltips to remind you of the purpose of each button.
In this example, we have defined a table in both the Header and Footer, and we are using table background colours to provide separation from the surveys they will be used on. Images should be inserted using the Image Manager on the editors’ toolbar. This allows users to re-use their images and be sure that the images are available to the recipients of the survey.
Note: Users can leave their Header and Footer blank if they choose to do so, however it makes sense to include some content in these sections to apply some consistency to all surveys.
Once users are happy with their Header and Footer content, they can save your template using the 'Save' button.
Next, you will be able to view the individual Styles attached to the elements that will make up your survey. You can edit the Header and Footer from here or move onto editing the other styles.
Clicking on each style, will reveal a pop-up editor with options which you can customise for that element. These options are outlined in the following table.
Style | Purpose |
Defult | This is the base style for all text which will appear on the Survey which is not covered by other styles defined here. |
Layout | Layouts allow you to group similar fields on a form, and any Questions you place into that Layout will render in a bordered container. This works well when you have different sets of data you are looking to collect on the same Survey – e.g. Contact Details, Organisation Details, Service Availability Details, and Suburbs Service is Delivered etc. Note: Layouts refer to the container as a Fieldset, so you will see that when managing this Style |
Header or text -Header 1 | This is used to control the look of all Headings on your Survey. You can have three levels of headings. |
Header or text - Header 2 | This is used to control the look of all Headings on your Survey. You can have three levels of headings. |
Header or text - Header 3 | This is used to control the look of all Headings on your Survey. You can have three levels of headings. |
Header or text - Text | This is used to control the look of page text on your Survey. This is useful for providing information to your Survey responders or guidance. |
Question | This is used to control the look of all Question text. |
Question Group | This is used to control the look of all Question Group text and layout of the question group borders. Question Groups are Questions which present matrices of related Question and Answer options. |
Section | Sections are similar to Layouts, in that they too will allow you to group similar fields on a form. However, Sections allow you to break your form up into different screens, so if you wanted to capture different sets of data on separated screens like a wizard, you could use a Section. |
For any style, you can control all of the visual attributes. You will be given an example of how your styling will appear as you edit the different attributes.
Once you are happy with your template, you can move onto creating a survey.
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