Thank you.
Can I suggest an improvement to the Manual?
First, a search on "import" got mostly "important". But a search on "import " failed to bring up the page you referenced.
More importantly, the section covering how to add questions (
www.limesurvey.org/manual/Adding_a_quest...Importing_a_question
) says nothing about Excel files--only csv, that it describes as outdated, and native format, .ls, which is in a very hard-to-use xml format.
There is no link from this section on importing to the Excel-format page you referenced me to.
PS. While on the subject of the manual. That same page (
www.limesurvey.org/manual/Adding_a_quest...Importing_a_question
) has a section on "Field Descriptions" that supposedly describes to a new user (like me) what each of the fields on the question-entry page. HOWEVER, many, many fields on that page are not listed here! (And I have no idea if they are important or not or how to use them. Many are text boxes--not pull-downs. What text is needed and how exactly identical does it have to be every time and where is what I enter stored, so that I know what I have previously entered so I can be consistent?
I have written a number of manuals for various purposes. One thing I have learned is that a manual writer needs to think like someone who is totally clueless about how a program operates. (I think back to my first programing class in FORTRAN and how I could not get my FORTRAN programs to run because I did not know JCL and the first card submitted in any program was a JCL card that had to be coded perfectly. I was learning FORTRAN, but no one bothered to first teach me JCL. I had to learn that from the operator at the computer center.) A lot of times a new user does not know about the things that a seasoned user assumes "everyone" knows about. It may be that this Excel import is one of those.
