Building forms
The form builder
The Build tab: adding, editing, reordering and duplicating questions, autosave, and the checks a form must pass before it's published.
Open a form and you land on its Build tab. It has three panes.
- The list on the left: the welcome screen, your questions in order, and the endings.
- The preview in the middle: the selected screen, drawn the way respondents will see it, in your form's design. Type titles and descriptions directly into it. A form set to All questions on one page previews as that one page, with every question editable where it stands: click into a question to open its settings. Desktop and Mobile above it switch between a full-width screen and a phone-sized one.
- The settings on the right: everything else about the selected screen. A switch at the top flips between the screen's own settings and the form's Design.
Adding and arranging questions
- Add question opens the list of question types. The new question appears after the one you have selected.
- Drag a question to move it, or use Move up and Move down from its menu.
- Duplicate makes a copy right below, with new ids, so its answers are kept separate.
- Delete removes it. Logic rules that pointed at it and answer recall tokens that quoted it are cleaned up for you.
Icons in the list tell you about a question at a glance: a lock means its answers are encrypted, a branch means it has logic, and a warning means something needs fixing before you can publish.
The question's settings
A question's settings are grouped into sections. Question settings is open when you select a question; the others stay closed until you select them, and while closed each one says what it holds, such as 2 rules, 1 calculation or On. A section you open stays open as you move from question to question, which helps when you're setting up logic or scores on several in a row.
| Section | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Question settings | Type (on a live form, answers already collected aren't converted), Tooltip, Required, Personal data for numbers (encryption), and everything specific to the type, such as a placeholder, limits or a scale's range. |
| Logic | Rules that send respondents to a later question or an ending. See Logic and branching. |
| Scores and calculations | Points for answers, or a running total. See Scores and calculations. |
| Dig deeper | A follow-up question about the answer. Only on question types that can have one. See Follow-up questions. |
| Picture or video | Shown above the question or beside it. See Design and branding. |
The title, the description and a choice question's choices are typed straight into the preview; a title can include earlier answers. The question types pages cover each type's own settings.
Formatting a description
A description can be more than a line of text. While you're typing in it, a toolbar underneath offers Bold, Italic, Link, List, Video and Picture; click away and the preview shows the description as respondents will see it, and clicking it again lets you edit it. The toolbar writes Markdown, which you can also type yourself:
| Type this | Respondents see |
|---|---|
**bold**, *italic*, ~~struck~~ |
bold, italic, |
[our terms](https://example.com/terms) |
a link, opened in a new tab |
https://example.com anywhere |
the address as a link |
- item or 1. item at a line's start |
a bulleted or numbered list |
| a YouTube, Vimeo or Loom link on its own line | the video, playable in the form |
 on its own line |
the picture |
Enter starts a new line and a blank line starts a new paragraph. Links can go to https:// and http:// pages or to an email address (mailto:); videos and pictures need an https:// link, as a question's own picture or video does. Put a backslash before a character to show it as typed, for example \*. Earlier answers recalled into a description always show exactly as the respondent typed them, never as formatting.
Tooltips
A tooltip is help most respondents won't need, such as what a term means or why you're asking, kept out of the way behind an ⓘ beside the question's title. Respondents see it when they hover over the icon, tab to it, or tap it on a phone, and Escape or a tap elsewhere hides it again. Write it in Tooltip under Question settings; the preview shows the icon, and hovering it shows the text. Use the description instead for anything everyone should read. Tooltips are translated with the rest of the form's languages.
Anything that has to be fixed before publishing is listed under the sections, under Before you can publish, so it's in view even when the section it's about is closed. Duplicate and Delete are at the bottom.
Autosave
There's no Save button. Every change is stored a moment after you make it, and the top bar says Saving… and then All changes saved. If a save fails (for example, your connection drops), the bar says so and offers to retry.
Edits from two people aren't merged. If a teammate saves the form while you're editing it, your next save waits and a banner asks which version to keep, and the other one is kept in Version history, so nothing is lost without you knowing.
Drafts and publishing
What you edit in the builder is the draft. Respondents only ever see the published version, which is a snapshot taken when you choose Publish. That means:
- You can build a form over several sessions without anyone seeing it.
- You can change a live form freely, and respondents keep seeing the old version until you choose Publish changes. The header says Unpublished changes until you do.
Earlier drafts and every published version are kept in Version history, where you can restore one.
The draft may be half-finished: a question with no title, a choice with no label, a logic rule pointing nowhere. Publishing is where those are caught. See Publishing and sharing for the full list of checks.
Viewing without editing
Workspace viewers see the same builder read-only (the tab is called Questions for them), so they can check what a form asks without changing it. See Teams and roles.