Course Content
Understanding XLSForm — the Excel-based survey format
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Introduction
The three core sheets
Basic Question Types
This section addresses the different types of variable and question types that can be asked in SurveyCTO.
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Question types in SurveyCTO
Skip Logic
This section addresses when questions are to be asked and when they are to be skipped in SurveyCTO.
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Skip Logic in SurveyCTO
Uploading and Publishing
A well-designed form is only valuable when it reaches the hands of data collectors in the field. The upload and publishing workflow takes your .xlsx file through a series of checks and transformations before it becomes a live form that devices can download and submit data against.
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Uploading, Validating and Testing
Creating Surveys on SurveyCTO

Every XLSForm workbook is built around three worksheets:

  1. The survey sheet is where you define every question in your form. Each row specifies what type of question it is, its internal variable name, and the label the respondent will see on screen (i.e. what the actual question is).
  2. The choices sheet holds all the answer options for your multiple-choice questions, organized into named lists that the survey sheet references.
  3. The settings sheet contains form-level metadata: the title shown to data collectors, a unique form ID, and the submission URL, among other options.

This separation keeps your form organized. Questions live in one place, answer lists in another, and global configuration in a third. When a form grows to hundreds of questions across multiple languages, this structure prevents the chaos that a single flat sheet would create. You can go through the attached sample sheet for a better understanding of what an Excel-based survey format looks like.

Sample Format

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