When asking the same question of multiple items, such as rating your satisfaction with different products from a company, it makes sense to use a table or matrix. Each of the selectable options (ratings) would be set as the columns in the table, while the rows would be defined as the different products.

That was an eyeful! A visual aid would be useful… oh look, here’s one now:

While there may be a core number of products you wish to always get information on, if your respondents wish to rant or rave about a specific product that is not part of the core survey target, you want to give them the opportunity to not only supply the name of the product, but also to rate that product just like they did for all the ones above. The cleanest way to do this within SurveyGizmo is to split the single table question into two parts: A checkbox question on the previous page, and then a table with question piping on the following page.

The logic is to split the question into two parts: identify which products they use, and then rate those products. This accomplishes a few goals:

• Reduces the number of products the respondent needs to rate to only those they use
• Provides a count of the most heavily used products in a quick glance during reporting
• Directly associates their rating with the ‘other’ suggestion

Using the above table as an example, the first question could be a simple checkbox question with 3 other boxes. Also, this question should be required so the survey respondent must respond with at least one check and have to rate at least a single product. It would look similar to the following:

The second step is to rate the products they have selected as products they have used previously. You will alter the original table by removing the row headers completely and removing the ‘Not Applicable’ column as it is no longer relevant. Finally, set the table to Pipe Questions From the checkbox source question.

What are the results? The new table will now contain only the items checked in the source checkbox question as the row headers on the left side of the table! To see this in action, check out the sample table piping survey.

If you have any questions or curiosities, head on over to our community forums!