Highlighting Error Cells

When providing answers to a Grid or 3D Grid question, the respondent can easily miss a cell and attempt to move on to the next question. In this case, a message will be displayed informing the respondent of the error and asking him/her to answer all the questions. However, if the Grid / 3D Grid question has a large number of rows and columns, it may be difficult and time-consuming for the respondent to find the cell(s) that have not yet been given answers. You can therefore set a property such that "error" cells are highlighted in another color, thus making them stand out. Proceed as follows:

1. In the survey, create the Grid / 3D Grid question.
2. In the Survey Tree, right-click on the HTML Styles folder and select Insert Style (Class).
3. Give the new style a logical name, for example "griderrorcell", and click Save.

The new style is created and saved in the HTML Styles folder. Note that this new style will be survey-specific - it will only be available in this survey.

4. Double-click on the new style or right-click and select Properties to open the style's Properties page.
5. Go to the Background tab and set a color for the Color property.

Here you can type a color code into the Color field, in this example, #FFFF00 - , or double-click on the color example square (the yellow square to the right of the field) to open the color selector dialog and select a color.



Figure 1 - Setting the background color for the style

6. Click Save and Close.
7. In the Survey Tree, open the Grid/3D Grid question and go to the Preview tab.
8. Click the Edit the Question Skin link to open the Question Skin Editor page (go to Shortcut to Style Editing for more information).
9. Double-click the Question Form Inputs element or right-click on it and select Properties to open the element's Properties page.
10. Go to the Grid tab, and for the Grid Table Error Cell Style field, click the down-arrow to open the drop-down list and select the style you have created above - .



Figure 2 - Specifying the Grid Table Error Cell Style

11. Click Apply and Close for the Properties page, then save the changes for the question skin.
12. Now go to Survey Settings, and in the Layout tab check the Highlight cells in grid that fail "Answer required" checks box (located towards the bottom of the page).
13. Save the settings.

Now, if a respondent misses an answer in the grid, when he/she attempts to go on to the next question, the error message will be displayed and the relevant cells in the grid will be highlighted with the selected "error" background color - .

Figure 3 - Example of a highlighted error as presented to the respondent