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

Validating before you upload

Before uploading to your server, it is worth running your form through ODK Validate or the XLSForm Online converter. These tools perform the same conversion your server will attempt and surface syntax errors — mismatched begin_group/end_group pairs, references to undefined choice lists, or malformed expressions — without touching your live environment. Catching errors at this stage costs seconds; catching them after fifty field devices have already downloaded a broken form costs hours.

Uploading to the server

On the iaforms SurveyCTO server, navigate to your project in the Design tab, and upload your Excel or Google sheets file. Here you can choose whether to upload it as a Draft or to Deploy to all devices. In Draft, the form is not yet available to field devices. This staging step gives you an opportunity to do one final round of testing before publication.

Testing your form

SurveyCTO provides a web-based preview of your draft form, accessible directly from the browser. Walk through the entire form, trigger every skip logic path, enter values that should be rejected by constraints, and verify that calculated fields produce correct results. For a more faithful representation of the field experience, use SurveyCTO Collect on an Android device.

Draft submissions are stored separately from live data and can be reviewed or deleted without affecting your production dataset.

Publishing and distributing to devices

Once testing is complete, you can publish and deploy your form. The form immediately becomes available for download by any device configured to connect to your project. On SurevyCTO Collect, collectors tap Get Blank Form, select your form from the list, and download it.

From that point forward, completed submissions travel from device to server automatically when a data connection is available, or queue locally until connectivity is restored.

If you later need to correct the form, upload a revised .xlsx with an incremented version number in the settings sheet; devices will be prompted to update to the new version while previously collected data remains intact. Make sure that the field team updates the survey form to the latest version before conducting surveys!

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