QUALTRICS 101 - FIXING FORMATTING ISSUES

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Video X – Fixing Formatting Issues

Summary of Topics Covered:

• Common formatting issues when copying from Word to Qualtrics

• Steps to correct formatting issues

• Using the Rich Content Editor in Qualtrics

• Ensuring active links in survey content

Script:

Hi, I’m Dr. Alex Russell from the Experimental Gambling Research Lab at CQUniversity. I’ve mentioned before that it’s usually a good idea to have a Word document ready with all of the questions you want to put into your survey. It really helps with programming. What a lot of people do is copy and paste from that Word document into the Qualtrics platform. Makes sense, right? The problem is, sometimes the formatting can be all messed up when it goes into the survey. So, I’m going to show you how to fix that and how to actually do formatting within Qualtrics. You can still copy and paste, but there are a couple of extra steps to make the survey look how you want it to look. Let’s get into it!

Here we see an example of an information sheet that’s typical at the start of a survey. It usually tells participants who you are, who to contact if they have any problems, and what the survey is about in general. We’ve got it nicely formatted with some bold headings and things, and we’ve even got an email address with an active link.

To avoid retyping all of this, the easiest thing is to select all of it, copy it, and drop it into the survey. When I’ve done that, it looks pretty good. However, you’ll notice that the link to my email address is broken, so I’d need to fix that.

When you preview the survey, the text might not look as you intended. Sometimes the text size is inconsistent, with one question appearing huge and the next one tiny, even if they were copied from the same Word document. Here’s what you can do:

First, set some defaults in your survey. Go to “Look and Feel” and set the question text size and answer text size. When you paste something into a question, it will use the text size from the individual question, not the default. To fix this, click on the question and either hit “Remove Formatting” or go into the Rich Content Editor and use the “T with an underscore X” button to strip all formatting. This will remove any inherited line spacing issues and return the text to normal.

You’ll need to reapply any specific formatting, such as bold text. It’s a bit of work, but much easier than retyping everything. For example, select the text that needs to be bold and apply the bold formatting again.

For email addresses that you want to make active links, select the address, click the link button, and choose the email option. Enter the email address and add a subject line if needed. This makes it easy for participants to contact you directly from the survey. You can also pre-fill some text in the body of the email to provide context for the participants.

When you preview the survey again, it should display correctly with all formatting fixed.

In summary, when copying text from a Word document into a Qualtrics survey, the formatting may not transfer perfectly. To correct this, remove all formatting using the Rich Content Editor and reapply any necessary styles. Ensure that links, such as email addresses, are properly set up as active links.

That’s it for today. A nice short one, but hopefully helpful for making sure your surveys look great. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to get in touch, and I’ll see if I can create a video on something you’d like to see. Catch you around!