First login - your user preferences

Login

So you finished installing LimeSurvey or you are a new (administrative) user given access to create, edit or view a survey or its results.  Your first role is to login to the administrative interface to LimeSurvey.  Visit the URL used to install your survey or that provided by your administrator to access the survey.

Note: If your surveys are located at the URL http://example.com/surveys/, then an administrative user can access the login screen by adding admin/ to the URL to thus form http://example.com/surveys/admin/.  If all you have is the URL to take the survey, say http://example.com/survey/index.php?sid=27352, then strip off the back end and add the admin/ trailer.

Change your password

To change your password, you had to click on the key . Here you can Manage users. You can change your password, your email and your name here.

About user preferences

To change your user preferences click on your username which is shown in the LimeSurvey main toolbar, and then click Edit your personal preferences.

A LimeSurvey administration user has several preferences associated with their profile:

• the language of the LimeSurvey administrative interface
• the inclusion of an integrated HTML editor
• question type selector, where "Full selector" lets you see a question preview when selecting type for a new question
• the default dateformat used in the administration interface

The administrative language preference

You can select the administrative language preference during login by using the dropdown list as shown below. After a successful login, the LimeSurvey interface will change to the chosen language.  The system will record this preference setting in your profile and make it the default for your next login.

Some LimeSurvey setups hide or skip the login page to enable common authentication inside other applications.  In this case, you won't have access to select the language. No worry since you can change your preference in the User Prerence once logged in as well.  Select your preferred language there to not only change the language of the current LimeSurvey session but also to record your preference setting in your profile for the future.

Hint: Recognize the location of this selection from the screen capture above in case the default system language is incomprehensible to you.

The HTML editor mode

There is an HTML editor integrated into LimeSurvey. This tool will help you develop rich formatting for your surveys, groups, questions, and answer text; for tables, images, and so on.  But as this editor takes extra space on the screen and resources on the computer, it is not always desirable to use.  So you can choose between whether the HTML editor appears in-line in the browser window or whether a normal text editor is always used.

Hint: You can always get to the HTML editor by clicking on the icon on the right of the normal text editor window as shown for the Popup option below.

You can choose between two settings for the editor:

Inline

The HTML editor is always used in-line on the page.

Note: If you want the toolbar to show up enlarged on startup you have to change some FCKeditor settings:

1. navigate to "/admin/scripts/fckeditor.xxx/"
2. open the file "limesurvey-config.js" with a text editor
3. search for "FCKConfig.ToolbarStartExpanded" and set it to "true"

In some cases you have to clean your browser cache to see the changes. For more information have a look at the FCKeditor Docs - Configuration Options

Popup

The normal text editor is used but the HTML editor is available as a pop-up option.

An icon-based tool bar of the editor can be exposed by clicking the wider, colored bar above the text editing window.  You can also increase the size of the editor to fill the browser window and then decrease it back later.

Source code mode

If you want to paste HTML code directly you have to switch to the source code mode. Click the "source code" button (in the screenshot it's called Quelltext) and paste your Javascript and/or HTML source code there.

You have to disable the Filter HTML for XSS setting in order to store code entered in source code mode.

Hint: Why not always choose the HTML Editor?  Depending on your use of LimeSurvey, there may be many text boxes on a single page, each with a copy of the editor. For instance, when editing the email text for a survey invitation that is offered in 5 languages -- you can then have a total of 20 in-line HTML editors active on the page.  Each instance takes a fair amount of resource and will likely cause issues on your browser.  So if you work with multiple language surveys, we recommend you stick with the normal text editor or 'Popup' setting.

To make the system more convenient when you are switching between which editor you use, the last used editor before logout is recorded to your profile and will become the default at your next login.

Note: Please note that when editing answers and labels, the normal text editor (or 'Popup' mode) is always used because of the larger number of windows.

Date format

This setting sets the date format for your administration user - for example if you browse results or for other settings. It does not affect the actual surveys.

When creating a survey you can set the date format at the "Presentation & Navigation tab. If you later want to edit this language specific setting at edit survey settings you have to click save and continue on the first screen to get to the language specific settings where you can then set the date format for each language of your survey.