The goals of a great Questionnaire are to elicit as much good information from the fewest questions in the least amount of time, all without error. To a significant extent, form really does influence function. This video demonstrates a dozen very cool, powerful, and a few truly sophisticated steps on the road to perfection.

Watching this video will create at least a handful of "Aha!" moments that will immediately make you more productive and your work more enjoyable as you learn to use Dividers, colors, indents, formatting, and the most spectacular of them all, links within the Q&A Table.

Let's suppose I've got a long questionnaire here. I'm gonna add a divider right at the top.

If you well actually let me start from scratch here because it occurs to me people may not even be familiar with dividers yet. So I'm gonna show you from scratch a few nice tricks to use with your questionnaire.

Start with a new document. File new blank.

And the form says something up above. We won't worry about that too much. We'll just concentrate on the question So I click questionnaire to add my questionnaire.

Making a blank one again.

And, let's start in. Let's say, first I need some information about the client, like the client name, name of client, and the client's email.

I'm not gonna type all these questions and the client's phone number.

And then I need some information about widgets. So I say widget price, widget quantity, widget shape, and size.

Then I need to talk about gizmos, gizmo price, gizmo location, and so on and so forth. And this grows to be multiple pages, gizmo, etcetera.

And and it's it's big I need to divide it up a bit organize it so it's gonna be easier for the form user to see what's going on and respond to it so the first thing I can do is add dividers this whole top section here talks about the client so I'm gonna add a divider which is just a heading really by clicking row column divider add and I'm gonna type in a heading here client info Then here where my widget section begins. Let me type this in so we can keep track of where we are. Price of widget, quantity, widget, etcetera.

Here where the widget section begins, I'm gonna put in another divider, row column divider, add widget info, and let's down here we'll do a Gizmo price.

Row column, divider, add, Gizmo info.

So now we've categorized things nicely that helps a lot. And we can go further. We can colorize different sections if we want to to make things stand out.

For instance, let's suppose we have a a a grid down here under the table. I'll add a grid, and the grid is more information about gizmos.

So I might have a gizmo, ID number, a gizmo, color, and a gizmo, whatever you got. I don't have size yet on gizmo and the gizmo size. So more information about gizmos here.

And I wanna tie those two sections together. The gizmo information up here, I wanna make it clear that it's related to the Gizmo information down here. I'm gonna colorize those two sections so that they're the same color and distinct from others in the in the questionnaire. So I click row column, divider, color, and let's make that light green.

And then down here in the grid I'll do the same row column divider color light green and so now just visually it's easy for me to see that those two are tied together and I can colorize these other ones up here too if I want them not to look so drab color go with a nice blue and here we'll go with the yellow divider color yellow so that's another way you can parcel things out in your questionnaire.

Then for the next stuff keep in mind as you you as you create a form this left column is going to become locked down as the form author. I don't really have a lot of control over the format of this left column but that left column will be hidden if I choose to show hide information so I don't have to worry about the left column much anyway the right column is definitely going to be locked down because some of its gonna be drop down boxes or check boxes and so forth so I don't have a whole lot of control over how that right column is formatted but the middle column is mine to do whatever I want with I can do any kind of formatting or special effects that I want to hear anything I can do to make things more clear for the form user is fair game and I ought to do it So, things that I have been doing in this column to organize the information for people.

One thing is, let's put in an item here for date. I'm going to add a row and let's see effective date effective date. One thing I'll do is I'll put in a format indicator. So I'm pressing a hard return here to give myself another line.

I like to put my my formatting cues over to the right hand side so I'm gonna right align this line that's this button on your word home tab.

So, that's now right aligned and I'll say format three thirty one twenty fourteen and what I've been doing is italicizing that and making it smaller than the other text. I want to distinguish it so that as they use this questionnaire they'll know just visually if they see a little italicized note there that's a formatting cue for for them.

In truth, the form tool in Docsara can accept all sorts of date formats and interpret them correctly as dates. But I've found that as people are filling in forms, they're really much more comforted with the idea that there is a particular date format that's required because then they don't have to think about it. They don't have to make any decisions. Oh, which how should I type this?

How does it want me to type this? It really doesn't matter much how they type that. But if I tell them a specific way to type it then they won't spend a lot of time worrying about it so I do put a format queue in there even for dates other format queues you might use are if you were asking for a salutation, you might put in the format cue Mr. Smith so that they get the idea that they're supposed to use the surname instead of the first name.

Other format cues might be for a particular number format that you want.

So anytime it's important to you what format they use when they're typing something in there, I use a queue like that. Another good thing to include in your questionnaire is indenting.

If I have a question that says name of client email client info, thinking of a good example of this.

I don't have any with what I've typed so far. So let me make up and let me add another row here.

Row column add row column add row column add.

I might have a sort of a general question about, residents. Let's say client, residence.

Does the client live in Washington?

And then, if yes, what state in I'm what county in Washington?

What city in Washington?

And you see how the second two questions are really dependent upon that first question.

Client state or county, I mean and client city.

So, in a case like this indenting can become very nice. So I'm putting my cursor here in the what county line and I'm gonna indent it slightly. I'm I'm doing that by dragging this little guy over in the ruler a bit, and then I can do the same for this question.

And now just visually, the person filling in the form can see the relationship between these these things. And I can even put in an additional queue here that says, if Washington then colon and maybe I'll indent this even further like that and like that.

If they respond Washington to the first question, then I have two follow-up questions.

And so, the user can skip over those easy for them to figure out which ones to skip and which ones not to skip if the the answer is not west Washington.

I've even used some additional formatting here make this italics, make this bold, And if you follow the same formatting rules throughout the questionnaire, they'll quickly get accustomed to, to how the navigation works. And it'll be easy for them to move around and skip what they need to skip.

Then finally, I would actually also make these headings bold now that I'm looking at my formatting.

Bold, bold, bold.

Finally here's the the thing I discovered this week that I like a lot. Sometimes I'll want to skip a whole question, or a whole section rather rather than just a couple of questions I might want to skip a whole section. For instance, suppose no widgets are involved at all here. I might put in a note that says if there are no widgets skip to gizmo info and I'll make that something distinct.

I've been using red like that And I've got, I think a four or five page questionnaire I've been working on. And there's maybe half a dozen read notes in there. If your response was such and such, then skip to such and such. And so people are able to skip huge swaths of this questionnaire depending on the circumstances.

And the part that I the fancy part that I stumbled into is to make use of words hyperlink, capability to make the skipping part even easier for them.

This gizmo info is pretty obvious in the in the questionnaire I've created here, but in another question error maybe it's on another page even. So it's not immediately obvious where the form user should skip to. So what I'll do is I'll create a bookmark which identifies this ismo info location and then I'll create a hyperlink up here which refers to that bookmark. I'll do that now and you'll see how it's created.

First, I select Gizmo info. I select the target of the, what's gonna be the hyperlink and I create a bookmark. You do that in Word by clicking on the insert tab then click on bookmark and then you have to give a book name to this particular bookmark. I'm gonna call it gizmo info.

It's always good just to be very literal about this so you're not wondering later.

There are no spaces allowed in a bookmark so I've removed the space but other than that I'm just calling it gizmo info.

Clicking add that location in this document is now bookmarked and so I can refer to it. The second step is to go up here and select the text that I want to turn into a hyperlink.

A hyperlink is like you see in, you know, Internet pages where you see an underlined word and when you click the underline it takes you somewhere else. That's what a hyperlink is. So I'm going to turn this phrase gizmo info into a hyperlink by clicking on the insert tab again.

On the insert tab look for this hyperlink button. Click that and you want to choose in the left column a place in this document. Your target for this hyperlink is not somewhere out on the internet.

It's a place in this document. So click on that and having clicked on that it'll show you in the right hand list here various places in your document that you can choose. Right now I could hyperlink to the top of the document or to a particular heading or to a particular bookmark. I've only got one bookmark to choose from at the moment. That's the one I want Gizmo info and I click Okay.

And now I've created an underlined hyperlink.

The coloring there is because Word always uses a particular color to identify hyperlinks. And then after they've been clicked, it'll change to another color. And the default colors are usually blue and purple. So don't worry about the color being different that's by design that so that people realize it is a hyperlink and they know they can click it. So now as the forum user when I'm coming along and filling in this form first off I know I'm expected to type a bunch of client info because it's all categorized here. As I'm typing the information, I get cues about what I should be typing.

And if some of the questions are dependent on other questions, the indenting here helps me navigate. And then if I get to a section like this widget info I have a queue here that says if there are no widgets skip two and I can just click here the little tag that the little flag that pops up when I hover over that says control click to follow link so I'm holding down the control key and left clicking on that hyperlink and it jumps my cursor right down to the gizmo info section and I'm ready to continue. That gizmo info section might be two pages later in the questionnaire and so I've just with a single click skipped straight to the next section that needs my attention without having to look at anything in between.

And I've I've started using these hyperlinks really liberally. I'll put them all through the thing anytime there's anything that's skippable. I'll just put one of these in and then it makes navigation a lot easier for the end user. If I marked, well first when I hide let me hide the thing for anyone who hasn't seen that before. I'm gonna choose to hide my labels column.

So it looks like that. I don't see that leftmost column so what they were asking is if that label column is hidden and I happen to have made that the target for one of my hyperlinks I didn't in this case in this case I made this the target so I won't run into that situation. But if I even if I did make information in that leftmost column the target the hyperlink is still gonna work because what it's gonna do is it's gonna drop my cursor in I just put my cursor there and you can't see it probably except it's a tiny little dot flashing. The cursor is still gonna go to that location which is the location I wanna direct them to. It's just that the cursor is not gonna be immediately visible to them. But at least I got them to the right spot in the questionnaire.

And then the second half of that is really I would rather have the cursor visible for them. So instead of making the label in the leftmost column your target, make something in the middle column your target. Either something in the divider because that's always gonna be visible or something here in the question column your target that way when you use your hyperlink they're gonna be able to see where their cursor lands and you won't run into that problem