Qualtrics Tutorials: Printing a Qualtrics Survey to PDF or Word

There are many reasons why you may need to print out your online Qualtrics survey to paper or to a PDF file. For example, if you are submitting an application for your research to your university of institution's Institutional Review Board (IRB), you must include a copy of your survey and your informed consent statement with your application. Alternatively, you may be distributing your survey in both paper and online formats, and you may want to create paper copies of your surveys using your existing Qualtrics survey.

You can print your survey to a PDF file or export it to a Microsoft Word file from the survey editor. The PDF print will look slightly closer to the online version, while the Word version will generally not carry over the formatting or look and feel of the survey. However, the PDF print will generally not show any skip logic, display logic, or branch logic; but the Word export of the survey can optionally be made to include branch logic, skip logic, or display logic conditions.

Print to PDF

To print a Qualtrics survey to a PDF file (*.pdf):

1. Open your survey.

2. While on the Survey tab, click Tools > Import/Export > Print Survey.

   

3. A new browser window will open, and will automatically prompt you to print a PDF.

Note that if you are using Google Chrome as your browser, you will most likely have more options for printing to PDF, including the ability to keep background colors and images.

Warning: Very wide questions (such as matrix tables or side-by-side questions) will often be "cut off" when you print your survey to PDF. If you are printing to PDF from Google Chrome, you can sometimes correct this by changing the scaling, but this will also shrink the size of the text. Be sure to check the results of your printed PDF.

Print to Word

To print a Qualtrics survey to a Microsoft Word file (*.docx):

1. Open your survey.
2. While on the Survey tab, click Tools > Import/Export > Export Survey to Word. You can choose whether or not to include question numbers, conditional logic, coded values (for multiple choice/ranking items), and whether or not to strip HTML formatting from questions and answers. Then click Export.
3. You will be prompted to download the file.

Example Printed Survey Files

The above steps will export a blank copy of your survey to a file. However, after you have collected survey data, you may want to be able to view an individual respondent's answers to the survey, as if you were viewing a copy of their completed survey form. For example, if you have a Qualtrics survey that collects submissions for a conference presentation, you will most likely want to view each submission separately, rather than trying to read a row of a spreadsheet.

When you have completed survey responses, you can export any individual survey response by doing the following:

1. While viewing your survey in editor mode, click the Data & Analysis tab.
2. The Data & Analysis page will show a table of your existing survey responses. Within the table, find row containing the response you want to print. Then, click the button in the Actions column for that row.
   
3. If you want to preview the response before exporting it to PDF, click View Response. Otherwise, click Export to PDF.
4. The PDF Export window will appear. If desired, enter a file name, and change the page orientation and page size. If you do not enter a file name, Qualtrics will use the respondent ID code as the file name. When finished making your selections, click Export.
   
5. The Manage Downloads window will appear, and will display Qualtrics's progress as it works to create the exported file.
   
   When the process is complete, the file download will automatically start. If the download does not start automatically, you can click the Download button when it appears in this window. Click Close when finished.
   1. If you close the browser tab before the file is finished exporting, Qualtrics will continue to process the export; you do not need to re-do the export process.
6. If you closed the browser tab before the export was complete, or if you need to re-download a response that you've already exported, navigate back to the Data & Analysis tab, then click Export & Import > Manage Previous Downloads. This will re-open the Manage Downloads window, and you will be able to re-download any of your previous data or PDF exports for the current survey.

Note: At the time of this writing (October 2019), there does not appear to be a way to generate PDF exports for more than one response at a time. If you want to export more than one response to PDF, you will have to repeat this process for each response. We will update this tutorial if this changes.

Example Printed Survey Response