Importing side by side questions from text

Check out the Qualtrics Support page for Importing and Exporting Surveys. I think their page anchors are broken at the moment, but scroll down to the section about Preparing a Simple Format TXT or DOC File. If that's not robust enough, the section right below deals with advanced formats. Fair warning, I had to port a lengthy survey (619 questions of yuck) from SurveyMonkey last year and I was going to use a txt doc, but it ended up being faster to set them up via the UI. Hopefully, since all your questions are in SbS format (mine were all over the place, format-wise), it'll ease your pain and be faster for you. Good luck!

Thanks Jeremy. I've checked the  Importing and Exporting Surveys page and there is nothing unfortunately about "side by side" questions. I wish there is a way to add that to the advanced text file...

Wow, didn't realize they omitted SbS questions from that documentation.. You could try some trail and error and hope they just left it undocumented for whatever reason.. The question API documentation has some commands like that, various restrictions or APIs that exist, but didn't make it into the documentation..

Alright, so I exported a survey as a qsf file and opened in Visual Studio code. After some tweaking, I discovered this is basically a JSON advanced format file. In VS code, I can use Alt + Shift + F to format code based on the language. This gives me a pretty print view of the data. Found a SBS question that looks like this:

You might be able to reverse engineer by creating a SbS test survey, have 2-3 statements, export the survey, open the qsf file in an editor, and set all this junk. And that's assuming they haven't code signed their exported files to account for "sql injection" when importing. But I think the trial and error alone is going to take you longer than just building out the survey in the survey editor, unfortunately. Wish I had a better answer. Best of luck!

Thanks Jeremy. I thought about reverse engineering the qsf file but I think Qualtrics advises against that. Do you know in the old documentation what was the format for SbS questions in advanced text? I could give that a try..

I don't remember much about the old documentation unfortunately.. I don't know if they took out functionality for SbS questions or just left them off the documentation (hence what led me to their qsf file). Apart from that mixed with trail and error, I don't know if that leaves you with many options. Maybe a quick helpdesk ticket asking their support for more information on SbS questions in advanced templates? I've found their support team to be a great quick resource for these kinds of unknowns.

Hi!

I would like to know if anyone succeeded with this. I want to import SBS questions from a text file. I have checked the documentation, looked it up in the forum and tried some trial/error without success. I need to build surveys with 200 SBS questions, so I plan to upgrade.