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Reusable Choices

Suite

Customer Experience Employee Experience Strategy & Research

Product

Qualtrics

What's on this page

About Reusable Choices

Sometimes you’ll need to reuse the same list of choices for many of your questions. Instead of copying and pasting the same choices over and over, you can create reusable choices.

Reusable choices allow you to save a list of choices in your survey that you can reuse in more than 1 question. If you realize later that you forgot to add a choice, you don’t have to edit every question individually. You just edit your reusable choices, and all questions using this feature will change automatically.

Qtip: If you add reusable choices to your survey, you can’t save that survey as a reference survey. If you try, you’ll receive a message that says, “You can’t copy a survey with an active reusable choice list to the library.”

Warning: Make sure you add reusable choices before you collect any data. Adding reusable choices to a question after you’ve collected data can invalidate the previously collected data. If you must add reusable choices after a survey has collected data, consider creating a new question that uses the reusable choices, while hiding the old question with display logic.

Project Type Compatibility

Depending on your license, you may have access to a few different types of project. Reusable choices are only available in a few different types of projects, including:

Reusable choices are not available in any project types not listed above.

Manually Creating Reusable Choices

You can create reusable choices manually or by importing them. Reusable choices apply to 1 survey at a time; editing your reusable choices in one survey won’t change them in a different survey.

In the Survey tab, click the Tools button.

Selecting Manage reusable Choices from the Tools menu

Select Manage reusable choices.

Click on a choice and retype the name.

Typing choice names, adding and removing with plus and minus signs to the right

If you want to add another choice, click the plus sign ( + ) or press Enter on your keyboard after changing the name of another choice.

To remove a choice, click on the choice and backspace until it’s gone, or click the minus sign ( – ).

When you’re finished, click Save.

Qtip: Remember that when you’re completely finished with survey edits, you should publish your survey.

Importing Reusable Choices

If you want to add the same list of choices to several surveys, or you have many choices with special formatting to add at once, you can save time by importing your choices.

Qtip: This file must be saved in a CSV UTF-8 encoded or TSV format. The first row must contain the headers. The maximum file size is 100M.

In the Survey tab, click the Tools button.

Select Manage Reusable Choices.

Click Import From a File.

Import file in the lower-left of the Manage reusable Choices window

You can download either a CSV template or a TSV template.

Import Reusable Choice List from File window, complete with example file

If you have additional questions on how to format your file, click Read more about column formats.

Once your file is ready, click Browse, then select the edited example file.

Click Show Options to adjust the delimiter or enclosure. Change the delimiter to Tab for TSV files.

Look at the Verify Fields section to confirm that the file is being read correctly.

Qtip: If you’re having trouble uploading your file, check out the CSV/TSV Upload Issues support page.

Once ready, click Import.

Qtip: If you import a new reusable choices file, all of your existing reusable choices will be overwritten.

Import File Columns

Display: This is the only required column. Name the choice. You can include basic HTML to add rich text, such as bolding, italics, or font colors. The maximum length of a choice name is 20,000.
Recode Value: Set a recode value for the choice. This must be an integer (a number with no decimals or fractions). Choices left blank will be automatically assigned recode values.
Active: If a choice is marked False, it’ll be considered inactive and excluded from all questions. Choices left blank or given a value of True will be considered active.
Variable Naming: Set a name for the choice. If you leave the choice blank, the choice gets their default variable name, matching exact choice text.
Text Entry: Whether the choice has text entry enabled. Set this column to True to add text entry, and False to exclude text entry. You can also exclude text entry by leaving the column blank.
Text Entry Size: Determines the size of the text entry box. Can be set to small, medium, or larger.
Input Width: Overrides text entry size. Use this field to set specific pixel width instead. Must be an integer (a number with no decimals or fractions).

Qtip: Input Width does not refer to a limit of how many characters a respondent can type into the box. It is the size of the text box itself.

Formatting Reusable Choices

Click on a choice, then click the dropdown arrow to view additional formatting options.

Allow Text Entry: Add a text entry box next to the answer choice. For example, if “Other” is a choice, you may want respondents to specify what “Other” is.
Text Entry Size: For answer choices that have Allow Text Entry enabled, change the size of the text entry box.
Qtip: This setting is disabled if you are using the New Survey Taking Experience.
Insert Piped Text: Pull text from another survey question, or from a variety of other resources, into your answer choice.
Move Up: Move the choice up by 1.
Move Down: Move the choice down by 1.

Hiding Choices

Sometimes, you may decide that you don’t want to include a choice from your list, but you don’t want to delete it. To hide a choice, deselect the check box to the left of the choice.

You can show this choice again any time by selecting the choice.

Qtip: Remember that this settings applies to all questions with the reusable choices. If you need to hide different choices for different questions, try setting answer choice display logic or check out the Filtering Reusable Choices section below.

Recode Values and Variable Naming

Recode values are the numeric values behind each answer choice. Variable naming is the label the data exports when you select label format.

In the Manage Reusable Choices window, click the settings icon.

Select the field you wish to edit.

Change the values by typing in the fields.

Click Save.

Adding Reusable Choices to a Question

The Use Reusable Choices option on the question editing pane

In the Survey tab, select the question you wish to edit.

Select Use Reusable Choices.

On the right under Choices, it will say 0. If you want to add additional choices just to this question, in addition to the reusable choices, click the number and type out how many extra choices you want.

Teal Reusable Choices banner; On the question editing pane, it says there are 0 choices

Reusable choices are marked by arrows.

Filtering Reusable Choices

Sometimes, you only want to include reusable choices based on special conditions. For example, maybe you want to hide a brand from the list being assessed if the respondent said they were unfamiliar with that brand in the first question.

Click the dropdown arrow next to the reusable choices

On the teal reusable choices banner, dropdown to the far right has an Edit option

Click Edit.

Select Use Filters.

Select a question to based the filter on.

Choose to Show or Hide based on this question.

Select what choices from the selected question to show or hide.

Click Save.

Example: In the screenshot below, Q1 asks what brands the respondent has shopped with. If we ask the respondent about their favorite of the brands, it wouldn’t make sense to include brands they’ve never shopped with before. Therefore we Hide the Unselected choices from Q1, because those are ones the respondent hasn’t shopped with before.

Qtip: Another way to only present certain choices from a previous question is to use the carry forward choices feature. You can carry forward choices from any question to another without having to use the reusable choices feature.

Question Type Compatibility

Any question with discrete choices is compatible with reusable choices. This includes:

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.

Why are my recode values all out of order?

Recode values are assigned in the order the answer choices are created. Before you start collecting responses, these values will reset to always be in sequential order as long as you haven’t edited your recode values yet. As soon as you select Recode Values to enable editing them, the order of the choices will be assigned to include re-ordering and deletion.

After you collect your first response, the recode values won't automatically update to be in a sequential order so as to protect your collected data.

So, if you make three options—we'll say Red, Yellow, and Blue—your recode values initially are 1, 2, and 3. If you delete Yellow and add Orange, Orange is the fourth option and has a recode value of 4. Your recode values are now 1, 3, and 4. If you move Red so that it’s the last listed option, your recode values are now 3, 4, and 1.

However, you can change the recode values at any time without affecting your data. You will see the updated values the next time you download your data or view your results.

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