Copy and paste questions when creating a form
Some of the forms I have created have similar questions in different sections. When creating the form, it would be convenient to be able to duplicate a question and tweak it, rather than create it again from scratch. I think this would be a big time saver. Thanks!
Idea posted October 12, 2011 by Robert Williams, Virginia Department of Transportation
Ideas
shared this idea
Hi Everyone,
I just merge a couple conversations around copying questions and question groups within and across forms together to have one place view the conversation.
We are still looking at how to make this process easier for all of you stay tuned in here!
Thanks
sammie
19 comments
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Kevin Lugo
commented
What would make a lot of sense to me is having 'Master Forms' and 'Master Questions' that are not assigned to a specific process. Then admins can assign the master form to different processes where the same form is used. If a change is made to the master an admin could select which processes would synchronize the update. If a process is synced, the form retains a link to the master. If it is not synced, or a process form is manually edited, it un-links from the Master and becomes its own form.
This would also work for Master Questions - I like the idea of being able to drag and drop Master Questions to create a new form using. The point is we often reuse materials many times for many processes, and it should be easier to do so and keep track of those changes.
Example 1: I found a small error where my instructions were confusing on a grant agreement form. I caught this after I had already copied the form several times. I had to go back and edit each copy instead of being able to make a single change and apply it to all affected processes.
Example 2: I have a standard follow-up report form. I decide mid-year that I want to add an additional question to any process that hasn't reached the follow-up stage yet. If there was a Master Form being used, I could update it and choose to only update the processes that are still open. The processes beyond the form stage would become de-synced from the Master so they are not changed.
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Isabel Eljaiek
commented
Are there any updates to this? Seems like it's generated a lot of interest, I'd appreciate an update.
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Rhonda Soos
commented
I agree with Graham. This feature IS long overdue and is greatly needed for efficiency and consistency purposes.
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Graham
commented
This is a necessary formatting tool for orgs that utilize branching heavily. Branching is a feature and it should not be limited by the need to manually generate new sections over and over. It's been two years since the last admin comment as well, I would say this feature is long over due.
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Karli Moore
commented
My org uses a lot of branching in forms and I'd love to be able to copy whole question group.
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Anonymous
commented
Yes, is there any movement on this? The way we set up applications and fund by various regions, we have to ask the same questions multiple times. It takes a very long time to recreate each question and it can be difficult to make sure a question is exactly duplicated multiple times.
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Carol Reynolds
commented
Any movement on this? Copying questions and question groups would be so VERY helpful!
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Amy Wckstein
commented
I agree. This is very time consuming and would be a great feature.
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Carol Reynolds
commented
It would be super, super, super helpful to be able to copy questions and/or question groups!
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Maggie
commented
Yes, copying a question would be an extremely helpful feature, our applications are long and a lot of the questions are repeated
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Kelli Rojas
commented
This would also help a ton when you need to create a process (D) that needs to share questions with multiple other processes (some from A + some from B + some from C). Currently, you have to choose which to copy and build from (A), then manually add the other questions and contact support to re-code those questions to match the field codes behind the scenes from the other processes (B & C).
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Meg Hillmann
commented
I'd actually like to see the ability to copy whole sections; I'm building a form that needs to ask the same set of questions about up to six different schools, and another set of questions about up to ten different people. Being able to make one section and duplicate it six or ten times would save a lot of time in form generation.
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Anonymous
commented
I think it will save a lot of time. I need 4 group of fields with similar questions. I have done two of them now. It would have been great if I had the ability to copy and paste the group and just change the titles.
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Nicole
commented
It would be really helpful to have the ability to copy questions, or groups of questions, to use within the same form. For example, I'm building an application where there could be up to 5 co-authors. I have created a group of questions for each co-author and we ask for the same information for each person. It would have been quicker/easier to copy and paste rather than manually creating the same group of questions 5 times.
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Nicole Blalock
commented
It would be really useful to be able to copy a question group within a form. There was a similar idea from about 2 years ago for copy-paste a particular question, but in our application, being able to take an entire question group and then tweak it within the same form would be a really great feature.
A use example is this - applicants need to add 4 3rd party responses to their request and each of those 4 people will be given the same exact group of questions. On our side, we would just need to be able to tweak the names of the questions (or have Foundant do so automatically) so that we know the responses are attached to 3rd party 1, 2, 3, or 4 when we pull the reports after the data is disassociated from the original request.
Thanks for considering!
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Kate Shirah
commented
The ability to copy questions or use a question library would save a great deal of time in developing new forms. A question library makes sense so that you can copy questions from form to form, and across processes. However, with a library, it would be great to be able to choose what questions get added or deleted from the library. I can imagine this would require a great deal of programming to maintain customization across clients. So, alternatively, being able to copy a single question, and maintain in memory (for copying within form and/or to other forms) until you copy another question would be helpful. I see this idea didn't get much traction from others - so maybe it is primarily useful to those of us who frequently modify or create new questions on our forms.
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Chris Dahl
commented
Hi Rob,
You're right that copy/paste functionality is pretty standard. We've got the "Copy" functionality at the form and process level due to the amount of work it does take to recreate those. However, in general, we've just not seen a big need for the copying of questions. It's not technically that hard to do, but it's not trivial either, so we'll keep it in mind going forward as we continue evaluating and prioritizing enhancements. We're constantly trying to balance our development capacity with client need and at this point, there's just some bigger pain points out there. Hopefully you've been noticing some improvements since you begin using the system!
I appreciate you taking the time to comment and respond to my question about the library. And don't hesitate to comment on other IdeaLab items ... it's hard to us to always gauge interest, but even more important in my mind is that we hear from people with different perspectives on particular items. My biggest concern is that we work on a given feature only to find out after we release it that it actually causes some issue for some of our clients. Obviously we try to anticipate that to the best of our ability, but with close to 400 clients, it's pretty hard to always be right.
Thanks again,
-chris
posted August 7, 2012 by Chris Dahl, Foundant Technologies
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Ideas
commented
Chris,
Thanks for responding to my suggestion! It didnt really take much time to create the questions, and I actually did paste the text most times, its just that I had to do the same ones about three times each and could have saved myself a few minutes if I could have copied the entire thing over. The copy/paste feature is a pretty stardard thing so I thought it might be something easy to include, but as I have no idea how to develop a system like this, that was just a guess.
As for the question library, I can see how that might be useful for some, but other than the basic name/org/contact info type of questions, ours are pretty specific and I don't know that I would find what I needed in a library of standard questions.
Thanks,
Rob
posted August 7, 2012 by Robert Williams, Virginia Department of Transportation
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Chris Dahl
commented
Hi Robert,
Is this still something you think would be helpful? I can see how this would be useful, but it's not something that's very high on the priority list at this point. One thing we've discussed is at some point potentially being able to create a question library that you can pull from to add to your forms. Do you think that would add value?
Is there a particular aspect of creating the question that is taking the most time? When I think about it, it seems like potentially the instructions or list items would be things that take some time to re-create.
Thanks,
-chris
posted August 6, 2012 by Chris Dahl, Foundant Technologies