Importing survey designs

Want to bring over your existing surveys into mWater?

Use the survey design import feature whenever you want to migrate over your existing surveys from another system to mWater, or want to design a survey in a spreadsheet before moving it online. Once you've imported the survey design, you can then continue to edit it in the standard mWater survey designer.

There are two options available depending on your use case:

1) You can use the common XLSForm standard when exporting from another system, or when wanting to create an advanced survey with many different question types and conditionality

2) Otherwise use our basic template to quickly set up a survey by listing question types, names, and where relevant question options. This template allows for the following question types: Text, number, radio (single choice), multi-choice, location and site.

In this guide we'll walk through both options.

Choose XLSForm if:

- You are moving survey designs across from another platform and can export those into XLSForm

- You have a long and complex survey design and want to fill it into a spreadsheet

- You want to include conditionality in your survey design even before you get to the online designer

Choose the simple template if:

- You want to create a straightforward survey design in Excel

- You don't need advanced question types, conditionality, or survey sections. These can be added in the online designer.

XLSForm is a survey form standard created to help simplify the authoring of surveys in Excel. It's convertible to ODK XForms and thereby compatible with ODK-based platforms.

Whilst the online survey designer in mWater is designed to allow you to design surveys for exactly your use case, if you are moving over surveys from another platform to mWater, choosing an XLSForm import can make a lot of sense.

The format is well established, and the mWater can handle many question types as well as conditionality (skip logic) built into the spreadsheet. Once you've imported the survey design, you'll be notified of any issues with the import and can make changes to the design before saving the survey.

A basic XLSForm file has two sheets: Survey and choices. An optional, third tab called settings can also be included. The survey sheet is where you define survey questions, and the choices sheet is where you list out any question choices linked to relevant survey questions.

Each row of the survey sheet maps to one question of your survey. The columns designate properties of that question.

Key columns are type, name, label::English, and hint. However, the template contains many more. Please consult the official XLSForm documentation for further details.

Now let's look at the import process in more detail:

1) Fill out your XLSForm (or export it from another platform)

2) Go to the Surveys page and click Import Survey Design

3) Choose XLSForm

4) Load the prepared file

5) Review any issues and update the design accordingly

6) Save the draft design and the survey will be saved in mWater

Then you can edit it as a normal survey.

Here's a walkthrough of the whole process:

For some use cases, the XLSForm is more complex than necessary. That's when we recommend using our simple template instead. This is a spreadsheet where you need to fill in only three columns:

Question name
Question type
Question choices

And you only need to fill in question choices for those question types where the choices are expected, that is: radio button questions and multi-check questions.

Each row you fill in the spreadsheet will be converted into a question in the survey design.

The importing process is very simple:

1) Click on Survey Design Import on the survey page

2) Download the import template

3) Fill in the name and type columns

If your question type is radio button (single choice) or multi-check, then enter the question options in the third column, separated by commas

4) Import the file

You can pick from the following question types:

Text question
Number question
Radio button question
Multichoice question
Location question
Site question

See the whole process here:

Once you have gone through the import process, you are brought to the survey designer where you can continue to edit your survey, add permissions, and start deploying it to users. To learn more about surveys in mWater, see here.

Importing survey designs

Which option to choose?

Importing XLSForms

Simple Survey Template