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Survey Publishing & Versions

Suite

Customer Experience Employee Experience Strategy & Research

Product

Qualtrics

What's on this page

About Publishing Surveys & Versions

Publishing enables greater control over response data quality. Instead of every edit to an active survey going live the moment you make it, you can instead control when all edits will be presented to new respondents using publishing.

Publishing is a vital step in the survey distribution process, since it determines the edits that are live to your respondents.

Survey versions allow you to save multiple iterations of your survey. You can preview or even restore old versions of your survey at your convenience.

Publishing a New Survey

When you publish a survey, it’ll be a little different if your survey is active and open to responses than if it is new. If your survey is new, the first time you publish will also activate a survey.

When you are ready to save your changes and present them to your respondents, click Publish.

Publish button on upper-right of the survey editor

Read the description and note that your survey is about to be activated. This means you will have to press publish after making changes, or else the active survey will look like the last published version.

Publish window warning the survey will go active

In addition to publishing your survey, you are saving a new version of it. Add a description of the changes you’ve made. This can be whatever you like. Dates will automatically be stored with the version, so don’t worry about adding date labels.

Click Publish.

Your survey has now been activated! On this window is the anonymous link. You can copy this by clicking Copy link.

Anonymous link and distributions link on the final survey publish and activate window

Qtip: Learn more about how this feature works on the Anonymous Link support page.

If you plan on recording participant data with responses, emailing the survey through Qualtrics, sending through SMS, or something else, you can see all your distribution options by clicking Go To Distributions. This will bring you to the Distributions tab.

If you aren’t ready to distribute yet, click Okay to resume editing your survey.

Publishing Changes to Active Surveys

Sometimes after sending your survey out, you’ll notice you need to fix something, or that there’s some important content you left out. If you edit your survey after it has been distributed, the changes will not go live until you publish the survey. This allows you to carefully review all of your changes before your participants see them.

Qtip: Publishing changes to your survey will never change the survey link.

Click the Publish button when you decide that you want the edits you made to be pushed to the active survey.

Qtip: If your survey is not yet activated, clicking Publish for the first time will activate it. See section above.

The publication status will appear to inform you which version of the survey you are currently viewing. Here, it says Published.

Example: After sending your survey out, you realize you forgot to add 3 different questions. You don’t want there to be respondents who see just 1 or 2 of these new questions, which is what would happen if the survey automatically published every time Qualtrics saved your changes. Instead, you can wait until you’ve added all 3 questions to press Publish. (And you can always send a retake link to the respondents who never got the 3 missing questions, of course.)

Qtip: Publishing a survey only affects new, incoming respondents. Responses in progress will be unaffected.

Qtip: If you’re testing your survey with the anonymous link and you don’t see your edits after publishing your survey, chances are the old version of your survey is cached on your browser. Try clearing your browser’s cache or opening the survey in a new browser. For more information on testing with the anonymous link, read the Testing/Editing Active Surveys page.

Saving vs. Publishing

Your changes are always saved automatically in Qualtrics, and they work exactly as explained in the Automatic vs. Manual Saving support page. Publishing just determines when your respondents see your saved changes.

Qtip: The publishing system exists to protect your survey’s data. It makes you think twice before pushing a change to an active survey that may invalidate your previously collected data. For more guidelines on editing active surveys, see our Testing/Editing Active Surveys support page.

Publishing Statuses

You’ll notice there are statuses at the top of the editor that change every time you edit or publish your survey. Click the grey icon next to a status to learn more about it.

Published status in green on upper-right of the survey

Published: The version of the survey you are looking at is the published version. It is what your respondents will see, so long as they didn’t start the survey before you published these changes.
Draft Version: You have made edits to the survey, but not published them. You will need to click Publish for your respondents to see those changes.
Qtip: If this is the case, a yellow banner will also appear to warn you.
Changes Live: You activated this survey before the survey publish feature was added to your account. That means that every edit you make will automatically go live. If you want to use the publishing system instead, click Publish. Then changes will only go live when you click Publish.

Features that Don’t Require Publishing

There are some features that will automatically impact your incoming respondents without you having to click Publish.

Project name (not the display name)
Survey Options: Back Button
Survey Options: Survey Availability
Survey Options: Survey Description (not the display name)
Scoring
Recode Values
Changes to connected reference blocks and surveys
Qtip: Changes to reference blocks and surveys are published in the library. See more on the Reference Surveys page.
Base language of the survey
Project status
Changes to the survey owner, division, or brand
Tools: Reset Recode Values
Tools: Salesforce Web to Lead
Tools: Salesforce Response Mapping
Tools: Trigger & Email Surveys (Salesforce)
Changes made outside the Survey tab (e.g., Workflows tab, Reports tab, etc.)

Qtip: Any feature not listed there must be published before it will take effect. This includes all features in the survey builder, Look and Feel menu, survey flow, survey options, and tools that are not listed here.

Qtip: Export survey exports the current draft, not the published version.

Version History

Every time you publish or save your survey, you create a “version” of it. You can view, preview, or even restore past versions of your survey this way.

Warning: Restoring to a previous version and then publishing can affect previously collected data. It can restore data that was invalidated by later changes to questions, but it can also invalidate data that was collected after the changes. See Restoring Previous Versions below for more details.

Creating new versions

Aside from publishing or saving your survey normally, you can choose to create a new survey version any time.

Navigate to the Survey tab and click Tools.

Highlight Versions.

Select Create New Version.

Add a description. This can be whatever you like. Dates will automatically be stored with the version, so don’t worry about adding date labels.

Click Create Version.

Qtip: Qualtrics will also automatically save new versions for you in the following circumstances:

If you have made changes and the last version was saved more than an hour ago

Every time you publish the survey

Additionally, you can’t save a new version if you haven’t made any changes from the previously saved version.

Viewing Past Versions

Navigate to the Survey tab and click Tools.

Highlight Versions.

Select View Version History.

Along the left, select a version you wish to view or restore.

Select View in survey builder to preview the version in the editor. Click Restore this version to restore.

Qtip: Restoring a version of the survey does not automatically publish this change.

Qtip: The name attached to the version is the user who was accessing the survey at the time of version creation, not necessarily the user who made the changes.

Qtip: The dates displayed in the sidebar to the left are all version creation dates, not necessarily publish dates. Once you click on a version, Published is the date a version was published, and Saved is the date a version was saved / created. A version won’t have a published date if it wasn’t published.

Version Options

When you select View in survey builder, you will not be able to edit the version you see. However, you have several options:

Date: Choose a different version to view.

Back to current draft: Go back to the current draft of the survey. This can even include edits you made that haven’t been saved yet.

Export: Export a QSF of the version to store as a backup or import as a separate copy of the survey.

Dropdown next to Export: Print the survey or export it to Word.

Restore: Restore this version of the survey as the active version. This saves the latest draft for retrieval later.

Warning: Restoring to a previously saved version and then publishing can affect previously collected data. It can restore data that was invalidated by later changes to questions, but it can also invalidate data that was collected after the changes. See Restoring Previous Versions below for more details.

Restoring Previous Versions

If your questions have been permanently deleted or changed in a way that you want to reverse, you might be able to restore an earlier version of your survey using the version in your version history. Restoring to an earlier version will bring back deleted questions and alter all settings to what they were at the time this version was created. It will also bring back that same version’s data.

Because of the publishing system, restoring a survey does not affect your respondents or hurt your data. You can restore a version, export old data and a survey QSF, and change back to the version you want to edit. Just make sure not to publish the restored version unless you are sure you want to overwrite your current survey and affect your respondents’ experience.

Attention: Just restoring a previous version of a survey will not affect the respondent’s experience – clicking Publish after you restore a survey will. Once changes are published, those currently taking the survey won’t experience a change, but new respondents will see the restored survey. Publishing will also overwrite data you have collected. Restoring and publishing versions too many times may invalidate old data, so proceed with caution.

Restoring and Publishing Surveys in Other Project Types

Every type of project where you customize a survey requires that you publish changes live, and every project has the ability to view and restore older versions. The options described above apply to the following project types:

There are also projects where the functionality is a little different. For Employee Experience projects, see the next section on Differences in 360, Engagement, and other Employee Experience Projects.

Attention: If you’re customizing a Conjoint and MaxDiff, there are much bigger differences to consider for restoring and publishing. See Restoring Older Versions and Publishing for details.

Differences in 360, Engagement, and other Employee Experience Projects

For the most part, publishing Employee Experience projects and restoring versions works as described on this page. (Employee Experience projects include 360, engagement, lifecycle, and ad hoc employee research.) However, there are a few small differences to take into account:

When you publish an Employee Experience project for the very first time, you are not activating the project. However, it is still important to publish so your edits get pushed to the live links you will generate later.

Activating 360 projects: The project will not be truly activated until you distribute it to participants or manually activate it on the Projects page.
Activating all other Employee Experience projects: The project will not be truly activated until you distribute it to participants, generate an org hierarchy, or manually activate it on the Projects page.

Publishing an Employee Experience project for the first time also does not give you an anonymous link to distribute the project with.

Other than these 2 differences, publishing is the same in Employee Experience as it is in survey projects.

FAQs

Can I edit a live survey that is currently being taken?

Yes, but there are a couple considerations:

Who will see the changes? Only those who have not yet started the survey will see the new changes. Anyone who started the survey prior to your changes will see the original survey, not the updated one.
What kinds of changes are okay? Superficial text edits are fine (e.g., fixing a typo or changing the font), as are adding questions or answer options. However, deleting questions or answer options can harm previously collected data. We recommend never deleting answer choice options or questions (unless you are 100% positive that you will not ever need any of the collected data associated with those answer choice options or questions). Instead, we recommend hiding unwanted questions and answer options with Advanced Randomization.

To learn more, visit our page on Testing and Editing an Active Survey.

How do I save/undo my edits to my survey?

Qualtrics is a web-based application and saves differently than other downloaded or installed types of programs. Rather than having a particular “Save” button, Qualtrics automatically saves whenever you click on an actionable item outside the area you are working on, or leave the page. For example, if you are editing a question, your changes are saved when you click on a different question or change tabs.

Often, Qualtrics will allow you to undo a change if you hit Ctrl + z (PC) or Cmd + z (Mac) on your keyboard. However, not all changes are undoable.

Qualtrics automatically saves previous versions of your survey when you make edits or publish your survey. Survey versions are a snapshot of your survey and its settings and allow you to view any past version and restore your survey to that form. See the linked page for more information on this feature.

How do I test my survey before sending it out?

Preview Survey allows you to see and take the survey as if you were a respondent. You can also use Generate Test Responses (found under Tools) to generate fake data, which you can then use to examine what your reports and downloaded data will look like. Generate Test Responses will also alert you if there are problems with the custom validation in your survey (e.g., if you have validation conditions that can never be met, you will receive an error message).

To learn more, visit our page on Testing and Editing an Active Survey.

When I generate test responses, what version of the survey will be used?

When you generate test responses, the draft version of the survey is used. That means that even if you haven't published changes to the respondents, you can test what the data of your current draft looks like.

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