Zottle

Import an XLSForm

An XLSForm is a spreadsheet questionnaire that Zottle compiles — questions, choice lists and logic included — into a form you can publish.

What an XLSForm is

XLSForm is the standard spreadsheet format for survey design, shared by KoboToolbox and ODK. A valid workbook has three sheets: survey (one row per question), choices (answer options) and settings (form title and form id).

Two columns carry most of the meaning: name is the technical name that logic refers to, and label is the text people read. Keep the column headers in English even when the labels are in another language — they are the keywords the parser reads.

The survey sheet can carry question types (text, numbers, dates, single and multiple choice, locations, media, barcodes), required flags, skip conditions, constraints and calculations, and group or repeat sections.

On import, Zottle converts the workbook to an ODK XForm — the XML format that KoboCollect and the web filler actually run — and loads the questionnaire into the form builder.

Import your workbook

  1. Open Forms in your workspace and choose Import, at the top of the page (available to the form-management roles: analyst and above).
  2. Drop your .xlsx (or .xls) file on the window, or click to browse for it. The same window re-imports a form previously exported from Zottle (.xml or .json).
  3. Zottle converts the workbook and reports any error it finds before creating anything.
  4. Choose the project the form belongs to. The form is created there with its first version, and the builder opens on it.
Tip

Already have a form in KoboToolbox? Its workbook usually imports without changes — question types, logic and choice lists included. When Google Drive is connected on your instance, the same window can also fetch the workbook straight from Drive.

What survives the import

Import is not a one-way door: the questionnaire is read back into the builder's model, and these details are kept through save and publish cycles.

  • Question types — open answers, numbers, dates, single and multiple choice, locations, media, barcodes.
  • Skip conditions, constraints and calculated fields — they keep working after the import.
  • Required answers and read-only instruction text (labels).
  • Groups and repeat sections, including nested ones.
  • Choice lists, including choices stored in a separate file — they are folded into the form with their translated labels.
  • Multi-language labels: a bilingual workbook stays bilingual.

If the import fails

When the workbook cannot be compiled — a missing list name, an unknown question type, a broken reference — the import window shows the error returned by the converter: fix the cells it points to and upload the file again. Nothing is created from a workbook that fails.

Smaller issues are handled in the builder: what can be repaired without inventing content is repaired, and anything that needs your decision — a condition pointing at a question that does not exist, for example — is flagged rather than guessed.

Next steps