Tracy van der Schyff

#Office365Challenge – Lets face it, no one likes completing surveys. Even more so when you have to complete questions which are not relevant to you. In this post we’ll be talking about branching logic on questions and how to set them up.

Related posts:
Around the Office in 365 Days: Day 26 – SharePoint Surveys = Creating the Survey
Around the Office in 365 Days: Day 27 – SharePoint Surveys Part 2 = Survey Settings

Adding branching logic to your survey questions is a great way to keep your survey as short as possible and focussed on your target audience. Branching logic works best on Choice columns, and this is where I have to apologize to the students I’ve trained over the last couple of years. I have always refrained from using Yes/No checkboxes. Partly because it has a default value already filled in, but also because I believed I couldn’t do branching logic on it. So I was wrong. I’m sorry. But in my defence – I always tell them that I don’t know everything, but I do know everyone who does, and we all keep on learning – every single day – especially in SharePoint.

So here goes. In the survey we created a couple of days ago – I had a question “Do you have dependants” and “How many dependants do you have?”. What I’d like to do is to add branching logic – if the user answers “No”, it should skip the next question regarding number of dependants.

We need to edit the question “Do you have dependants” to be able to apply this.

Go to your survey settings and under “Questions”, click on the question you would like to add branching logic to.
Because you’ve used a choice OR Yes/No checkbox, you will be able to add branching logic. Scroll to the bottom of the question settings.
Branching Logic: Specify if branching is enabled for this question. Branching can be used to skip to a specific question based on the user response. A page break is automatically inserted after a branching enabled question. Learn about branching.

Set the logic and Save. As stated above, when completing the survey, an automatic page break will appear below the question – to first allow the user to make a choice – before moving on to the next question.

Come on peeps?!?! How easy was that? Yet another AMAZING thing SharePoint allows us to do – without writing any code. See you tomorrow when we’ll look at editing / deleting / reordering existing questions as well as the necessary validations on them.

Overview of my challenge: As an absolute lover of all things Microsoft, I’ve decided to undertake the challenge, of writing a blog every single day, for the next 365 days. Crazy, I know. And I’ll try my best, but if I cannot find something good to say about Office 365 and the Tools it includes for 365 days, I’m changing my profession. So let’s write this epic tale of “Around the Office in 365 Days”. My ode to Microsoft Office 365.

Keep in mind that these tips and tricks do not only apply to Office 365 – but to the overall Microsoft Office Suite as well as where applicable, SharePoint.