You can add an image or an MP3 audio file, or embed a YouTube video. In fact you can embed all kinds of online media using the appropriate HTML embed code.

What you can’t do is use multimedia as the answer options (e.g. click on the image that most closely resembles the tidyness of your desk) but there are work-arounds.

For example, an audio clip could have five short clips, introduced as A,B, C, D and E (you could quickly edit this together in Audacity) and then the question could be “Which of these five short phrases quotes do you think sounds the most sincere?”

Or you could use an image editor to assemble four images and add labels to identify each:

Q: Which of these fungi are deadly poisonous? (Choose one or more)
0 A
0 B
0 C
0 D

1. Go the page on youtube page of the video you want to include.
2. Look for the ‘share’ button under the video
3. Click the ‘Embed’ link that appears
4. Tick the following options of the list that appears
   – Use HTTPS
   – Use old embed code
5. Copy  the code in the box that appears. It will look something like this:

   <object width=”560″ height=”315″><param name=”movie” value=”https://www.youtube.com/v/G0k3kHtyoqc?version=3&amp;hl=en_GB&amp;rel=0″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”https://www.youtube.com/v/G0k3kHtyoqc?version=3&amp;hl=en_GB&amp;rel=0″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”560″ height=”315″ allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed></object>

6. Go to iSurvey and edit the question you want to add the you tube video to and click the ‘Multimedia’ tab
7. Paste the you tube embed code you copied earlier into the ‘You Tube’ space
8. Update your question

A side-effect of this is that if question information (or any information entered using a formatted text box) is ‘dodgy’ the system will refuse to duplicate the question, section or survey.

The FIRST thing to try is to simply to ‘edit’ the question that is not copying properly. When you are on the edit page, simply click the ‘Update’ question’ button. This may fix the problem. If so do this for any other questions that are causing problems.

99% of all other problems have been caused by copying and pasting from Microsoft word WITHOUT using the ‘Paste from word‘ option. If you have recently tried to copy a question, or copy a survey and have had missing questions, or the survey has refused to copy at all, this will be the reason.

How to cure this problem
1. Locate the question with the invalid markup code (usually its the one question that hasn’t copied), and click ‘edit’.
2. Copy and paste the entire question text
3. Delete the contents of the text box entirely
4. Click the ‘Paste from word icon’  or the ‘Paste as plain text icon’  

If you require any help locating the ‘dodgy’ text in your surveys then please contact alexfurr@soton.ac.uk



This allows you to increase / decrease font sizes / colours / font family as well as adding  tables and links etc…

Don’t forget you can add mp3s and images to each question as well.

Finally, please note that questions WITHIN a matrix block cannot have formatting applied to them as this would likely disrupt the matrix table layout.

A typical example of this is shown below

Normal 0 false false false 72 544×376 Normal 0 false false false What is your age?

The additional ‘Normal false false…’ etc… is redundant code imported from Word.

How do I fix it?
To remove the junk text simply do the following:

1. Select all the text in your question

2. CUT the text out

3. Use the ‘Paste from word’ option icon on the text toolbar to re-paste. It looks like this >>> 

That should fix the problem.

If you do not care about formatting your questions at all, it is highly recommend you use the ‘Paste as plain text’ option which looks like this >>