I am developing a survey with a lot of questions. To make it easier for users in the development stage I created 7 forms of the survey, each one with about 60% of the total questions. Across the 7 forms all pairs of questions are asked together at least once.

I created one form entirely in the LimeSurvey on-line program. (I am a GoDaddy user and set up LimeSurvey as one of the free services available thru GoDaddy.) I then exported that survey in tab-delimited format. I opened Form 1 in Excel and replaced all the questions with the questions for Form 2 (there is a 60% overlap of items) and saved it under a new name. I also changed the SID field and the surveyls_survey_id to a new number.

When I import this new form nothing imports. I get a new survey listed in my list of surveys, but it has a different number and, when I click on it to edit it, I get an error statement that says it cannot be opened. At the end of the import I get the message box listing the numbers of components imported. It shows 1 survey and 1 language. Everything else is "0".

What must I do to make it easy to create duplicate forms with differing questions? I thought the problem may be with the ID column so I changed all the numbers. No luck. I copied Form 1 to Form 2 and exported that, then changed only the text of the appropriate questions. No luck. I blanked all the ID numbers. No luck. Re-entering an entire survey (19 standard questions, plus 180 array sub-questions) takes a very long time. Copying from one spreadsheet into another and then importing that new spreadsheet would save a lot of time.

What is the key to making that import work? I find nothing about it in the manual.

Not related to LimeStore

Else : You must saved as TSV (see wikipedia).
Best solution is to use LibreOffice Calc.

And don't care about the 1st 2 columns (you can delete it if you don't have quota)
bugs.limesurvey.org/view.php?id=14944

"TSV" and "tab-delimited" are the same things. It will not matter which spreadsheet program is used to create a tab-delimited text file. I could use NotePad if I wanted to! My use of software and the term I used to describe the file have nothing to do with the failure of the import.

I have no idea how that was posted in LimeStore. Sorry.

Thank you for the tip about the first 2 columns. When I deleted them the import worked perfectly. That will save me a LOT of time. Definitely a bug. I'm glad you put in the bug report.

Can you put the information at bugs.limesurvey.org/view.php?id=14944

Please. I's a fan of the old TSV, but not for the new one …