Is there a way to import data from an Excel file into a question response? | XM Community
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Is there a way to import data from an Excel file into a question response?


In my survey, I am looking to ask the question "How much money would you give to these people?" with question choices being Person A and Person B. I want to import age and gender of Person A and B from a big Excel file and vary the combination of Person A and Person B for each survey respondent. Is there any way to do this? Many thanks in advance!
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Best answer by Michael_Campbell_RedPepper 19 March 2018, 17:38

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Userlevel 6
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I think the easiest way to achieve this would be to add columns to the seed file for Age and Gender for Person A and B. You can then pipe these into the answer choices by going to the rich content editor and piping text in from an embedded data field.
Userlevel 4
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I know there is a way to do this with the REST API. If you have the contact information for the person in the same spreadsheet, you can add the information via Embedded Data Fields, and then access that in the way that @uhrxx005 explained, via Piped Text!
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Will you have control of your respondents or will this be a survey that will be for a random sample? I'm by no means an expert on embedded data and Piped Text, but in my experience this has to be assigned to the respondent. If you have a distribution list you can use the embedded data/piped text to pull in the age and gender of Person A and Person B, but if you are purchasing respondents or having people use anonymous links then I don't think that would be possible. @Michael_Campbell_RedPepper ?
Many thanks for all your answers. This will be an in-class survey. My idea was to ask all students present in the classroom how they would distribute money to student A and student B (not in the classroom but drawn from an Excel list), varying student A and student B's gender and age according to the Excel file I have. So each student present in the classroom will answer the survey, will see the same question "How would you distribute money between A and B" but they will each see different answer choices e.g "A: 28 years old philosophy student" and "B:18 years old maths student". Is that possible? Many thanks again.
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@Miranda_W Oh! I misread the question! I see what they were asking. If I understand correctly, you want to randomly show the information from A and B to each respondent?

I see. Well, there is a difficulty here - there isn't a really good way to import a spreadsheet into Qualtrics to populate a question without getting into REST API stuff. How familiar are you with the Javascript API? I can walk you through rendering preprogrammed values, but I don't think you can use a spreadsheet in this example.
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Is that something you would be willing to do?
I am very willing to learn but know nothing essentially! Also I am afraid I would only get a spreadsheet so is there a fast way of converting it to whatever format it needs to be in?
Userlevel 4
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For sure! I totally understand that. And I agree that an Excel Spreadsheet would be a way faster way to get this done, but yeah, it's not supported yet.

I'm trying to think of the best way to go about this, with the least amount of technical stuff. There are some clever ways to do this with code, but I'll rely on the platform as much as possible.

What if you had an Embedded Data Field that was a Random Number between 1 and 10 (Qualtrics has that as an option for Piped Text, i.e. ` ${rand://int/1:10}`). Then, you could have a survey flow with logic in it saying, "If their number is equal to 1, then show them this block", for each number 1-10. Then, you could get some random variation in there.

Like this:

!

I know that this is *definitely* not as flexible or dynamic as you would like, but it involves the least amount of technicality in my opinion.

If you're willing to get your hands a little dirty with Javascript, let me know and I can walk you through it!
Ah thank you this is great, simple and fast! Definitely what I was looking for
Userlevel 4
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I'm glad! Keep me posted on how it works out, and if you need any more help!
Hi Michael,
Sorry but I do not seem to be able to make it work... My "allocation" block never shows, can you please point me in the right direction?

Many thanks in advance

!

Michael_Campbell_RedPepper Hi, I am looking to do something similar and am wondering if you did have a way to do it with javascript?

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