Can I start a study from a document I already have?

On What do you want to learn?, under Or bring a document you already have, choose or drop a Word file, a PDF or a text file, up to 4 MB. For a Google Form, paste its link under Or paste a Google Forms link and press Read the form: it must be open to anyone with the link. For Microsoft Forms, save the form as a PDF and upload that.

Here’s what we found says what we think it is (a research plan, a survey, or a plan with a survey in it) and what we took from it. Change it if we got it wrong. A survey keeps your questions as you wrote them, and questions we already know the answer to, like name and phone, are left out. When an item isn’t a question (a heading or label over a scale, like “Cleanliness of school facilities”), we ask it as one, for example “How concerned are you about how clean school facilities are?”. Asked as a question lists each one with your wording, and you can change any of them in Questions.

When we write the survey questions for you, we follow common survey practice: one idea per question, everyday words, a clear time like “in the last 30 days”, what people did rather than what they would do, answers that cover everyone and don’t overlap, and ratings that ask about the thing itself (how easy, how important) rather than agree or disagree.

We then ask about anything the file doesn’t say and draft the study, with a screener of 3 to 5 questions. You check every step before it goes live.

We read the file or form once and don’t keep it. Scanned PDFs (pictures of pages) can’t be read: upload the Word file or a PDF saved from it.