Hiding a column using conditional formatting feature

Eli Starkman

I am in the process of creating a survey for my work place. The survey questions are all yes/no questions. These questions take form of their own individual columns on the spreadsheet. Some of the questions have nested follow-up questions, with responses being children  to a primary parent question. For example:

 

" Do you like Pizza?" If yes is selected, then you would be provided a list of toppings to select. If no, then you would not be asked the pizza topings as it would not be relevant to you. Instead, it would take you to another questions. 

 

My goal here (if possible) is to hide all the columns that would be nested response questions should the survey taker respond "no." I know that Smart Sheet has a conditional formatting feature, but I am not sure how powerful enough it is to make the this happen. Is this possible? 

 

 

Zac

I don't believe conditional formattng can hide columns. Are you creating a web form for these surveys? I've done a few surveys for random things, pizza actually being one of them, and web forms seemed to work the best. I grouped the nested follow up questions with the main question into sections. You won't get the functionality you are looking when it comes to hiding nested questions but the forms allow help text and default values so you can get creative with those to give the users better instruction on what is expected when completing the form.

 

In the end, the only person that will actually see the sheet and all the survey results would be the owner and anyone shared to the sheet. The web form can be sent to everyone via email and can be completed without them being shared to the sheet.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Zac

J. Craig Williams

For survey's, we've been playing with AppSheet as the front-end and Smartsheet as the backend.

Very promising and handles the conditional logic well.

 

Craig

Kennedy Stomps

Another option is to use Google Forms for the actual survey, because it does support this kind of conditional logic, then use our integration with Google to pull the data into Smartsheet: http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/portal/articles/1850129. Hope that helps give you lots of options!