Response Editing

About Response Editing

Perhaps you’d like to remove profanity, spelling errors, or sensitive information from a respondent’s text entry response. Maybe a respondent told you they answered 1 or 2 questions incorrectly before they submitted their response. Response editing allows you to revise survey responses right inside the Data & Analysis tab. Qualtrics will even maintain the original data so you can revert back to the original responses any time.

Changes made with response editing will be reflected in the Results and Advanced-Reports, and in CX Dashboards. You can also export raw data with response edits with the default (Data Table) format.

Editing Individual Responses

This workflow describes how to edit 1 response at a time. You can also make edits to multiple responses before reviewing and publishing your changes.

1. Click on the field you’d like to change.
2. Edit your response. For multiple choice questions, you will have a dropdown to select from. For text entry, you will be able to type answers directly.
   
3. Click out of the field to finish editing.
   Qtip: When making edits, you can only input data that matches the field’s data type. For example, if you’ve created a text entry question with Numeric Validation, you will only be able to type in a numeric answer.
4. Click Review and Publish to review the changes you made. Here you have the option to delete individual edits, revert all current edits, or publish your edits.
   Attention: Response edits will not be saved automatically. You must publish your edits for them to be reflected in your dataset.
5. Once you’ve reviewed the changes, click Publish your Changes to save them.
   
   Qtip: Your changes may take a couple minutes to appear in the data table. While they are processing they will appear as pending requests.

Editing Multi-Answer Questions

Some questions allow respondents to select multiple answers. Editing these fields is a little different.

First, click on the answer to begin editing the question. You can then use the checkboxes to edit and remove answer choices.

To remove an answer, uncheck the answer choice you want to remove. To add another answer, select the checkbox next to the answer choice you want to add.

Editing Multiple Responses

This option allows you to edit the same field for multiple responses at a time.

1. Select the responses you’d like to edit using the checkboxes to the left of each response. You can select all fields by clicking the column header left checkbox.
   
   Qtip: Adding filters to your Data & Analysis tab can help you narrow down what responses you want to select for editing. See our Filtering Responses page for instructions on building filters.
2. Click the editing icon.
3. Where it says Field Name, select a field to edit.
   
4. Where it says Value, select or type in the new value.
   Qtip: If you see a “replace existing values?” option, then you are editing a custom field. See Tagging Multiple Responses for more information.
5. Click Update to save your edits.

Restoring Original Data

Restoring Data for a Single Response

A gray triangle will appear in the upper-left corner on any response you’ve edited. Clicking on this triangle will tell you when the data was edited and by whom.

It will also give you the option to restore data.

1. Locate the cell of data you’d like to restore to its original state.
2. On the top-left of the cell, click on the gray triangle.
3. Select Revert to original to restore the original response.

Restoring Data for Multiple Responses

It is also possible to restore data for multiple edited responses at once.

1. Select the responses you’d like to edit using the checkboxes to the left of each response. You can select all fields by clicking the column header left checkbox.
   
   Qtip: Adding filters to your Data & Analysis tab can help you narrow down what responses you want to select for editing. See our Filtering Responses page for instructions on building filters.
2. Click the revert icon.
3. Select the field you want to revert.
   
4. Click Revert.

Fields That Cannot Be Edited

Nearly all question types and fields are editable via the response editing tool, including text entry questions, multiple choice questions, slider questions, and embedded data fields. However, there are a few types of data that are not editable:

• Survey metadata, such as response ID, start date, and other fields Qualtrics records automatically for your survey.
  Qtip: The only exception is User Language, which can be edited.
• The contact field called Distribution Channel.
• Viewing order data of randomized choices, questions, or elements.
• Heat map questions
• Pick, group, and rank questions
• File upload questions
• Signature questions
• Timing questions
• Meta info questions
• For Net Promoter® Score questions, groups cannot be edited, but you can change the numeric value, which will assign the Group accordingly.
• Scores and scoring categories
• The outcome of formulas and fields created through bucketing cannot be edited directly. However, if you edit the questions the custom variable is derived from, the outcome of the custom variable will change, too. Notice that when the height is modified in the example below, BMI changes to fit the new data.

Before editing height:

After editing height:

To learn how to edit the rule behind the formula or bucketed variables, visit our Editing Custom Variables support page.

Projects Where You Can Edit Responses

Data & Analysis is available in many different types of projects. You can edit responses using Data & Analysis in the following kinds of projects:

• Survey projects
• XM Solutions
• Imported data projects
• 360 projects
  Qtip: See Managing Response Data (360) for more details.
• Conjoint
• MaxDiff
  Qtip: You cannot edit conjoint- or MaxDiff-specific data. Only additional survey content.

While the functionality is technically available, we do not recommend editing responses other types of Employee Experience projects. See Response Editing (EX) for more details.

FAQs