PDF exports for ALL responses

I checked with Qualtrics directly, and nothing yet. I agree that this seems like low hanging fruit with a lot of benefit. I work in high education and unfortunately I can't recommend Qualtrics to programs where they will need to report their data this way as it will be too administratively cumbersome.

Since this doesn't seem to be a native feature, my standard workaround uses the data export (to csv, xlsx, or the like) and then using Word's Mail Merge feature to generate pages for each response. My method assumes you use Excel and Microsoft Word, but I believe there are similar features in Google Sheets/Drive and Apple Pages/Numbers. The benefits of this are that it doesn't require scripting or accessing the API, it allows lots of flexibility in the resulting PDF, and it's much faster than copy/pasting responses.
I've tried to be exhaustive in these instructions in case you've never used Mail Merge, but it's a quicker process than the number of steps makes it appear!

1. From the Data & Analysis page, click on the "Export & Import" menu, select "Export Data..." and export to a CSV, Excel, or XML file. Make sure you select "Use choice text" rather than "Use numeric values."


2. Open the resulting file in Excel. Make sure the first row is the set of question text or numbers: this is how you'll identify the field over in Word. If there's a second line with one or the other (text or numbers), delete the one you don't want. If you're using question text and have any particularly long but similar question names (e.g. a long question name for a multiple choice + other free text), rename those columns to something shorter and distinct.


3. If you have any fields that are likely to be over 255 characters, create a dummy row for the first row that includes filler text over 255 characters. I typically go to a lorem ipsum filler text generator site and just paste that filler text into any appropriate fields. This is important: if you don't do this, and the first row of data doesn't have any text responses, Mail Merge will cut off the response at 255 chars.


4. Save the resulting Excel file.


5. Open a new document in Word. Create a template (not a "Word Template", just text): I typically just write in one word or a few words that identifies the question, followed by a colon, but use whatever makes sense to your application.


6. Navigate to the "Mailings" tab in Word, click the "Start Mail Merge" menu, and select "Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard..."


7. In the wizard, select document type "Letters" and click "Next: Starting document". Select starting document "Use the current document" and click "Next: Select recipients". Select recipients "Use an existing list", and then click "Browse..."


8. In the dialog box that opens, navigate to your Excel data file, and click "Open". Choose the appropriate sheet (there's usually just one), make sure "First row of data contains column headers" is checked, and click "OK". On the next screen you can omit any unnecessary responses: you can omit the dummy row, if you made one, on this screen. Click "OK". Back in the wizard, click "Next: Write your letter".


9. Place your cursor where you want to insert the answer text, and in the wizard, click "More items..." to insert Database Fields into your template. Choose the appropriate one, and click "Insert".


10. Repeat step 9 for each field. You can also insert fields more quickly by using the "Insert Merge Field" menu in the "Mailings" tab of the ribbon.


11. Once you've added all the fields, click "Next: Preview your letters" in the wizard. This allows you to scroll through responses and make sure the formatting is as you want it. Once you're satisfied, click "Next: Complete the merge".


12. To export to PDF, click "Print..." and print to a PDF. To save as a Word document, click "Edit individual letters..." and save the resulting document.


13. If you save the template, you can reuse it with other surveys!

jcsalevan Thanks! you've gotta' love a good work-around!
But I'm still wanting this as a native feature : - )

Based on the replies, I'm going to submit this as a Product Idea. I'll post here what the # is so you can upvote it (if you so choose)

This feature is now available in Qualtrics. Go to Export & Import --> User-submitted files

Pritesh_Z , I'm not sure this is it. "User-submitted files", I believe, refers to files that are uploaded by respondents (using the File Upload feature - which is a paid one), not PDF reports of the survey results (which is what we want).

Sopwith Totally agree. The new functionality is definitely useful, but doesn't replace the need for an ability to print the full response out, preferably as a PDF Thanks Pritesh_Z, but that's a different issue.

Hey Sopwith and mklubeck sorry for the confusion, I misread this thread.

It's November 2022 and this still isn't possible in Qualtrics. It's clearly an intentional decision to leave off this feature. I need to review the entire response from an individual so I guess I'll have to use something else next time because exporting each one is a huge waste of time. If anyone has a simple workaround let me know (I'm not a programmer - I just want to check the boxes and click export to PDF). Thank you

We did an export to Excel, cleaned it up a bit with a macro, then did a mail merge with a word document, and printed to PDF. That works...but it was not trivial. Especially since there are a few limits that we ran into. 1. being the number of fields you're allowed to mailmerge. That answer is 255. We had 1,007. So I concatenated fields. And eliminated others. Easily got below the required amount. Also had to do some date formatting so they printed as a date rather than a julian number. I SO want this feature...but with my luck, they'll add it but not to the Core XM.

So here's some python code I wrote to accomplish this, using Selenium and Chromedriver. More technical than most people really care for, but if you can run python and jupyter notebooks, it works.
https://github.com/wetchler/teaching/blob/master/Pulling%20Qualtrics%20PDF%20responses%20automatically.ipynb

Hi, need help on the URL for export to PDF file. 

The pattern looked like below. 

https://qualtrics.com/responses/surveys/{survey name}/responses/${e://Field/ResponseID}/pdf/exports/9af055a0-9af0-42bf-a18f-e67baeba700b/stream?fileName=${e://Field/ResponseID}

The part “/9af055a0-9af0-42bf-a18f-e67baeba700b/”, I am not sure what it is. 

Every time we make change and publish survey, it changes. I want to use URL in post survey email. 

Thanks a lot!  

I have done this and it was not trivial. I wrote a command-line program in Go that turns the csv data into Markdown files, based on Go Templates. I also wrote shell scripts to do that conversion to markdown using the command-line program, then convert the markdown files to PDFs using pandoc.  The system is specific to our needs and not something that I’d recommend others necessarily try to use or adapt. In any case, it’s all here: https://github.com/rahji/reviews (Sorry, I can’t really answer any questions related to it). I really wish this wasn’t necessary - it’s confounding to me that this basic feature isn’t in Qualtrics. I assumed I was missing the option to select which fields should appear in the PDF, let alone an option to export all of the responses in bulk!

Rob

Similarly, this is a common request/need on projects I work on using Qualtrics. Would be very useful!

Also chiming in as someone that would love this. Especially as my survey is literally only a couple of text entry fields and then a signature field.

Alright, here is my workaround. Doesn’t necessarily look any easier than others’ but it’s working quite well for me.

The below steps are when you just want all the PDFs together--no need to segment by audience or condition. But you could also do a version of the same process where you create different email triggers/workflows with conditions to send different responses to different folks. After Step 1, you’d just tell the recipient to follow Steps 2 and after to create their own foldering system. 

1. Set an email trigger/workflow to send an email to yourself each time a response is submitted. You can either check the “include response summary” option or (my preference), use piped text to create a “report” format for your response data that you really love--this will become the PDF. The piped text option obviously works best with instruments that aren’t too long, but it does omit all the annoying metadata that I don’t care about.
2. Create a designated folder for these responses in your email inbox (I use Outlook) and then a rule that automatically organizes these emails to that folder as they come in. I usually create the rule on the basis of “Subject line contains” and then make sure to give my Qualtrics email trigger a unique/meaningful subject line. 
3. Once you’ve got all your responses as emails sitting in your folder (or any time you want), select all the emails in the folder* and print to PDF. Then save the big PDF to your desktop or another folder of choice.  
4. If you’re fine scanning through all the responses in one big PDF, you’re done! If you want to split the PDF into multiple files per response, open the big PDF in Acrobat and Organize pages > Split. I’d probably do by page numbers, since my instrument has very few open text responses and so all responses are going to be the same number of pages.  But I’d probably do some spot checking of my files after to see if they’re messed up.

*Note: This is the way I have to do it in Outlook--you may have other options to batch-download emails in a given folder as PDFs. 

​@kkrohn1 ​@Goldie ​@Clint ,
 

Solved: PDF response extraction workflow bottleneck. Built a two-stage automation that transforms hours of manual clicking into minutes of organized batch processing. Successfully tested with multiple datasets. This solution addresses the workflow gap research teams face when needing individual response documentation for analysis and compliance.

Full article & Demo: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/automate-bulk-pdf-response-downloads-two-stage-gisic/