Hello,
I’ve reviewed the discussions for Quizzes and haven’t found a solution that works for me so am hoping someone from the community can help me.
I have a list of questions that need to be answered by users every quarter. I want the questions to be in rows and I want to record the users responses (yes, no or long format) in columns. This means that each time a user responds a new column needs to be added to GS. How can I achieve this?
Thankyou
This is not going to be the answer you are looking for, I’m afraid.
There really is no way to automate what you describe, and even though it will be possible to do it manually, you’ll be creating a lot of work for yourself. You could probably automate the creation of new columns in your GS with some apps script or an automation tool, but at that point you’ll be stuck. Because you’ll have then have to manually configure all the new columns and associated screen components in Glide each time.
A much, much better approach would be to have one row for each set of answers per user, per quarter. You could either have one column for each question response, or (probably what I would do) combine all responses into a single column as a joined list. An approach like this would be way way easier to maintain, and you wouldn’t have the chore of configuring a bunch of new columns and screen components every quarter.
I agree with this, it’s a much cleaner way to approach this problem and the data structure is much easier to maintain as well.
I agree with both Darren and Thinh. In Glide, when a list of items needs to become longer on a regular basis, this should probably be done vertically by adding rows, not horizontally by adding columns.
For me, a column represents an attribute of an item, like a descriptor (a name, image, number, … or a variation thereof thanks to computed columns). Sure you could consider an answer to a question a descriptor, but it would be like having to add someone’s height, and then favorite food, and then date of birth (descriptors) regularly every quarter. This feels uncomfortable: either the attribute is needed in the project or not, but you don’t add one at regular intervals to add data. During normal usage of your project, the number of columns is fixed and the number of rows might expand.
Thank you all @Darren_Murphy @ThinhDinh and @nathanaelb for chiming in and stopping me from heading into a disaster. I’ve modified my spreadsheet so the questions are in a finite number of columns. I appreciate it!