Importing questions from another tool

If you already wrote the survey somewhere else, you shouldn't have to type it again to find out whether InviziPoll suits you. Import questions takes an export or a paste from your current tool, shows you every question it recognised, and turns your confirmation into a draft poll you can edit before anyone sees it.

#Where to find it

There are three ways in:

• Import questions in the admin sidebar opens the full import page. When you start a new poll, the Import from another tool card takes you to the same page.
• Import from another tool on the Questions step of the poll builder opens the same importer in a dialog, and adds the questions to the poll you're editing.
• Bulk import in the Questions toolbar is a quick paste box: one question per line, or CSV. It runs in your browser.

Import is available on every plan, including free workspaces and workspaces whose trial has ended. The AI bias review that can follow an import needs AI authoring (a trial or a paid plan). Without it, the flow simply ends one step earlier and your questions are saved exactly as written.

#What you can bring

Formats are detected automatically. If detection guesses wrong, pick the right one from the format selector and the file is read again.

The CSV shape is a header row beginning with question, then one row per question with its answer options:

question,option1,option2,option3
How clear was the reorg announcement?,Not clear,Somewhat clear,Very clear

Files up to 2 MB are accepted, and an import produces at most 50 questions. If your export holds more, the first 50 come across and the preview tells you how many were left behind, so you can split a long survey into two polls deliberately rather than discovering the gap later.

Pasting instead of uploading

Google Forms and Microsoft Forms have no question export, so there's no file to give us. For those, and for any form you can only see on a page, use the Paste from anywhere tab. What happens next depends on your workspace.

On a workspace with AI authoring (a trial or a paid plan), select the whole form, copy it and paste it in. A model reads the questions out of it. It transcribes; it doesn't write new ones.

A paste is 20 to 20,000 characters and can carry up to 50 questions. A long paste is read in parts and put back together in order, and if any part can't be read, the whole import fails and nothing is charged. A form with more than 50 questions is refused rather than trimmed, so you're never handed a short poll and left to notice the gap yourself. Split it and paste twice, or export it to a file.

A paste costs AI credits by size: one credit for every 2,000 characters, after we strip extra whitespace and repeated page headers, so a full-size paste costs ten. The screen shows the cost before you send it, and you're charged only if we find questions. During a trial, pastes also draw on an allowance of ten credits for the whole trial. AI usage and fair use has the details.

On a workspace without AI authoring, including free plans and ended trials, the paste is read line by line in your own browser, for free. Paste one question per line, or CSV with a question,option1,option2 header. Every line becomes a single-choice question with placeholder options you can edit, and a CSV row keeps the options you gave it. There's no character limit here; if the paste holds more than 50 questions, the first 50 come across and the preview says how many were parsed.

#What survives the crossing

InviziPoll polls are built from eight question types: single-select multiple choice, multi-select multiple choice, numeric scale, NPS, ranking, word cloud, open text, and date or time. Your source tool almost certainly has some type that's none of those, so a little translation happens, and the preview is where you check it.

1. Choice questions arrive as choice questions. Typeform multiple choice, picture choice, dropdown, yes/no and legal; SurveyMonkey single and multiple choice; Qualtrics multiple choice. Option labels come across in order. A choice question needs at least two options, so a question that arrived with only one gets a placeholder second option, and the preview says so. A question with more than eight options (ten for multi-select) keeps the first of them.
2. Rating questions arrive as scales. Typeform rating, opinion scale and NPS keep their number of steps. Qualtrics sliders keep their minimum and maximum, within 0 to 10. A source NPS question becomes a 0 to 10 scale rather than an NPS question, deliberately: a 0 to 10 rating might be a recommendation question or a satisfaction rating, and guessing would relabel your question for you. The promoter and detractor figures are computed for any 0 to 10 scale, so the score is on the results page either way. Change the type in the builder if you want it labelled as an NPS.
3. Matrices arrive as a grid. A Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey rating matrix becomes one scale per row, with the first and last column headings kept as the scale's end labels, and the rows are grouped so the builder, the respondent page and the results view show them as the table you authored. A SurveyMonkey grid whose columns are choices rather than a rating becomes one single-select per row instead, with the column labels as its options, grouped the same way. Each row is still a complete question underneath, which keeps exports, cohorts and trends working per row. See matrix and grid questions.
4. Ranking questions arrive as ranking questions. Typeform, SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics rank-order questions keep their items and their order, because order is what a ranking question is. A ranking whose export carried no readable items is flagged rather than guessed at. See ranking questions.
5. Free-text questions stay free text. A long-answer box arrives as open text and a short-answer box as a word cloud, both keeping their original wording. That includes Qualtrics text entry: multi-line boxes become open text, single-line boxes become word clouds, and a text entry with a date validator becomes a date question.
6. Date and time questions arrive as date or time questions. The input mode comes across. Exports rarely carry a timezone, so UTC is assumed and the preview says so. Set the real one in the builder before publishing.
7. Descriptive text is dropped, not converted. A statement, a page of instructions or a SurveyMonkey presentation block isn't a question, so it's skipped and listed with everything else that was skipped.
8. Everything else becomes a placeholder. A file upload, a signature field or a question type with no equivalent arrives as a multiple-choice question carrying the original wording, with the source's own answer labels where it had any and placeholder options where it had none. The preview says which of the two you're looking at and why. Rewrite it or remove it before publishing.

Some Qualtrics elements are skipped outright rather than stubbed: descriptive blocks, graphics, page breaks, timing and metadata, constant sum, side-by-side and drill down. A rank order element is skipped only when the export carried no items to keep. The preview lists each thing it skipped and why.

#Questions that could identify people

Once the preview is up, every imported question is checked for things that could give away who answered. These are the same checks as our free anonymous survey checker, they run in your browser, and they're on every plan, free ones included. Nothing they find stops the import.

• A question that asks who someone is, like a name, an email address, an employee ID or a phone number, is flagged on its own row with Remove this question. One click takes it out before the draft is made.
• A question that asks which group someone is in, like team, location, tenure or age band, gets a note. Imported questions aren't tagged as demographics, so tag it in the builder and results for groups under the minimum size are held back.
• Several group questions together get a warning, because each one splits people into smaller groups, and a small group is easy to recognise.
• Free text that asks for a story, an example or a name gets a suggested rewrite: ask about the pattern, not the incident.

The Bulk import box shows the same findings as a short list under the parsed questions. Check a survey for identifying questions explains each one.

#Branching and logic

Conditional logic comes across from Typeform (the form's logic jumps) and Qualtrics (skip logic), as far as it fits InviziPoll's branching model. A rule imports when it's a single "if this answer equals that value, jump forward to that question, or end the poll". The preview tells you how many rules came across, and they land on the poll's branching panel, where you can check them before publishing.

Anything that doesn't fit that shape isn't bent into a different rule. It's left out, and the preview names the question it belonged to. That covers compound conditions, backward jumps, Qualtrics display logic (show or hide isn't the same as a jump), rules that start from or point at a grid, and rules that start from a ranking question. SurveyMonkey logic isn't imported yet, and neither is logic from CSV, JSON or a paste, so rebuild those rules in the builder. See Conditional branching.

#What doesn't come across at all

Answer data, first and unconditionally. Also: required-answer settings, images and media, page and section structure, piped text, randomisation, quotas, and any respondent or contact list. Formatting inside question text is stripped, so a bolded phrase arrives as plain words.

Long question text and long answer labels are shortened rather than dropped: anything over 200 characters for a question, or 60 for an option, is cut at a word boundary and marked with an ellipsis, and the preview tells you which questions were shortened so you can reword them yourself.

#Why answers are never imported

Responses in InviziPoll are encrypted in the respondent's browser, and the server stores only ciphertext. There's no way to write a historical answer into a poll so that it would ever be readable in results. Importing them would mean either storing plaintext answers or storing something we could never show you.

Keep your old tool's exports where they are for historical reporting, and use InviziPoll from the next round onward. See Viewing results for how a new poll's results become readable.

#What happens to what you upload or paste

It depends on how you brought the questions in.

An uploaded export file is read once, in the request, by InviziPoll's own parsers. The recognised questions go straight back to your browser for the preview. The file isn't stored, its text isn't stored, and it doesn't leave our servers.

Pasted text on a workspace with AI authoring is read by a model, which is the only way to make sense of a blob of text copied off a page. The text you paste is sent to Anthropic, the AI provider InviziPoll uses, which returns the questions it found. It's used to answer that one request and not to train any model. We don't store the paste, and the model is instructed to transcribe the text rather than act on anything written in it.

Pasted text on any other workspace, and anything in the Bulk import box, never reaches our servers at all: it's parsed in your own browser.

In every case nothing is saved until you name the draft and confirm.

Our audit log records that an import happened: who ran it, which format was detected, how many questions and branching rules came back, how many warnings there were, and how large the upload was. For an AI paste it also records the model used, whether credits were charged, and the size of the paste. It never records any of the content, of either the paste or the questions.

#After the preview

Name the poll, pick a team folder if your workspace uses them, and confirm. You get a draft poll, not a published one, so nothing is visible to respondents until you publish it yourself. From there it's an ordinary poll: see Creating your first poll for the rest of the wizard, and Workspace poll templates if you want to save the result as a reusable starting point.

#Turning import off

Import can be disabled for a workspace on request. It isn't a self-service setting: ask InviziPoll support and we'll turn it off for your organization, after which the import entry points disappear and the importer refuses.

There's also a rate limit of 30 file imports per workspace per hour. A real import session never reaches it.

#FAQ

#Related

• Check a survey for identifying questions
• Poll wizard authoring tools
• Conditional branching in polls
• Matrix and grid questions
• AI usage and fair use