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For any visible field, there are other properties that you can set. In the online form designer, you can easily edit these properties whenever adding or editing a field; in the spreadsheet form definition, they appear as columns on the survey worksheet:

  • Text in the hint column will appear italicized under the field's label. (Unlike the label column, hints cannot include HTML formatting and are always shown as italicized.)
  • The user's selection or entry will default according to the value in the default column, if any. Alternatively, you can use the calculation column to specify a dynamically-calculated default value. See the help topic on providing default entries or selections for fields for more details.
  • Enter "yes" into the required column to require that a non-blank value be entered or selected before moving to the next question.
  • Specify image, audio, or video filenames in the media:image, media:audio, and/or media:video columns to include visual or audio media as part of any question. If you're working directly with spreadsheet form definitions, then you must remember to always upload all media files when you upload the form to the SurveyCTO server (and the filenames for all uploaded files must exactly match the names you specify in the form definition itself). Which media file formats are supported will depend on your device, but all devices support common image formats like .jpg or .png. For an example, see the images sample form.

There are a few other columns on the survey worksheet that can be used, though they do not appear in the online form designer:

  • Enter "yes" into the disabled column to temporarily disable a field. You might do this, for example, if you want to remove a question from a survey in the field, but want to keep it in your form definition for some reason. (If you want to remove a field for new submissions but keep exporting data for old submissions, put "0" in the relevance column instead. That will make it so the field never appears, but it will technically remain a part of the form and so existing data will still be exported for it.)
  • Enter "yes" into the read only column to indicate that a field is read-only (i.e., the user cannot enter any value).
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