Commenting your form that doesn't break the converter

Question

How are people anticipating the metadata of design and sharing Excel forms when Survey123 shifts from beta to full version and new users will seek samples and guidance?

I was thinking about this in Fulcrum and ODK, but I want to informally poll Survey123 users about how people leave notes for themselves or others embedded in the XLSX document to annotate design and choices.

New versions change design efficiency or create/remove workarounds.

Special formulas and units calculations need some hints for the back end or folks backwards engineering a form to understand how to adapt to their own.

Consistency and ease in doing these comments or reading them is always a plus.

What are your best practices for internally tagging your form designs that don't break the converter?

#commenting inside Excel form for design metadata

Joseph_Kinyon · Answer

Thanks Ismael, I'll get creative and glad to see it is simple to have things ignored by the converter.

IsmaelChivite · Answer

Hi Joseph. The converter will not complain if you add new columns to the worksheets. For example, you can add a new 'comments' column to the survey worksheet, so you can add your own internal comments to any row in your survey.  You can also use  comments from the Review  tab in Microsoft  Excel to add comments to particular cells.  I also like to use  colors (for the background of cells or the font). The  meaning of  colors can be documented in an additional worksheet. Both colors (and actually any formatting in your cells) as well as additional worksheets will be  ignored during the XLS to xForm conversions. Finally, if you want to get fancy, you can even add ink, screenshots, shapes and pretty much anything you can add from the Draw and Insert tabs in Excel.