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Add Default Choices

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About Adding Default Choices

You can use the Default choices feature to pre-populate answer choices within a question when the respondent opens the survey. This can be useful in situations when you ask respondents to update previously collected data, such as mailing address, email, name, etc.

How to Add Default Choices

  1. While editing your survey, select the question you want to add default choices to.
    selecting a question and then choosing default choices
  2. In the Question behavior of the survey editor, select Default choices.
  3. Provide the answers you want to be pre-populated (e.g., a selected choice or specific text).
    Edit Default Choices window
  4. Click Save.
    Save button on bottom-right
  5. To clear a default choice, return to the edit default choices window, click Clear, and then click Save.
    Close button on bottom-left

Questions with default choices will have a gray circle icon located in the top right corner.

the grey circle on a question indicating it has default choices

Qtip: The default choices feature pre-selects an answer choice for your respondent. If a respondent decides to skip this question, then your results will still display data as if the respondent had given an answer. In scenarios where you need to suggest an answer but you would like respondents to have the option of a non-response, it is a good idea to use the force response feature and to allow respondents an NA option so they can specify that they don’t want to provide an answer.

Question Compatibility

You can add default choices to the following list of question types.

Displaying Piped Text in Default Choices

You can use piped text as the default choice in any type of question where the respondent can enter text.

To access piped text in a default choice, edit your default choices and click the blue dropdown menu directly next to any text field.

blue dropdown on the Edit Default Choices menu allows a selection of piped text

Example: Using piped text as a default choice from your contact list can allow respondents to quickly update any personal information without the hassle of remembering or re-entering all the information.

Default Choices in Different Project Types

This type of question behavior is available in just about every type of project. The options described on this page are available in:

FAQs