Exporting a survey structure

=General=

To export a survey, select the survey, then move your mouse over the 'Display / Export' icon in the survey toolbar. A dropdown menu will open and then choose the icon/entry 'Export...'. You will be presented with several export options explained below.

=Export survey structure (.lss)=

Naturally once you've finished a small masterpiece of a survey, with branching, hundreds of questions that has taken you 5 days to create you'll want to make a backup. This export will dump all the groups, questions, answers and conditions for your survey into a .LSS file (which is basically an XML file). This dump file can be used with the 'Import survey' feature when creating a new survey.

Please note: This file does not contain any collected responses.

Also if you have made a specific template for your survey you have to export that separately. A survey which uses a custom template will import fine, but the template it refers to will not exist on the new server. Go to the template editor on the original server and export the template as a zip file. Import this template on the new server and things should work fine.

=Export survey archive (.lsa)=

This export is intended to create a complete backup of an active survey for archival purposes. It will include the following data in a ZIP file.
 * Survey structure
 * Response data (WARNING:  Responsedata from fileupload-questions is currently not exported)
 * Token data (if activated)
 * Timings (if activated)

The goal of this format is to be able to check out results of a past survey by re-importing it into LimeSurvey again.

=Export queXML format (*.xml)=

queXML is an XML description of a questionnaire. It is not suitable for backing up a LimeSurvey instrument as it cannot export conditions, or all question types. Exporting a questionnaire to queXML allows you to create PDF documents that can be printed, filled then scanned and processed using queXF software.

It currently exports the following Question types:


 * Arrays
 * Array 5 point choice (A)
 * Array 10 point choice (B)
 * Array Yes/Uncertain/No (C)
 * Array Increase/Same/Decrease (E)
 * Array flexible row format (F)
 * Array flexible column format (H)
 * Array (flexible Labels) Dual Scale (1)
 * Array (Multi Flexible) (Numbers)
 * Array (Multi Flexible) (Text)


 * Mask questions
 * Date (D)
 * Gender drop down list (G)
 * Numerical question type (N) - defaults to width of 10
 * Multiple Numerical Input (K)
 * Boilerplate (X)
 * Yes/no radio buttons (Y)


 * Multiple choice questions
 * Multiple options checkbox (M)


 * Single choice questions
 * Drop down list (!)
 * 5 point choice (5)
 * Drop down/radio button list (L)
 * Drop down list (W)
 * List with comment (O)


 * Text questions
 * Multiple short text (Q)
 * Short free text (S) - defaults to text input width of 240 "boxes"
 * Long free text (T) - defaults to longtext field with 1024 display rows
 * Huge free text (U) - defaults to longtext field with 2048 display rows


 * Not yet implemented:
 * Ranking style (R)
 * Slider control (^)
 * Multiple options with comments (P)

=Export tab-separated-values format (.txt) =

This feature is designed to make it easy to use Excel to author and edit surveys. It completely eliminates the dependence upon SGQA codes.

It also makes it easy to do bulk editing of your survey, such as find-replace, bulk-reordering, looping (repeating groups), and testing (such as temporarily disabling mandatory or validation criteria). Check out the dedicated documentation for this format.

=Export printable survey (*.html)=

The survey can also be exported in two printable formats.