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You can place “hint” texts at the first and last locations in answer lists, and at the ends of the prompt and scale rows for Grid questions. You can use these for example instead of writing instructions, to indicate the “direction of flow” for the answers or options. Note that for Grid questions the hint texts look best when the Appearance property is set to Grid Bars, Star rating or Horizontal Scale; the texts can be used in other appearances but may not look so good. For other questions types, usage should be assessed on a question-by-question basis.
To include hint texts, add your desired text separated from the scale values by <space><hyphen><space>. If for example you have the Scale set up as shown here below (note the "- Bad" and "- Good" texts for the 1 and 5 grades in the scale):
Figure 1 - Scale setup
Then the layout will automatically be arranged as shownhere below, with the texts placed at the ends of the rows of selection boxes.
Figure 2 - Resulting layout for a grid bar appearance
Note: Hint texts can only be added to the first and last scale values that have codes. A “Don’t know” answer option would need to be located outside the row of “value” answer options, so would be placed after the hint text. It will then interfere with the hint text, and this will not look good - see below. Forsta therefore recommends you do not attempt to use hint texts for questions that need “Don’t know” values.
Figure 3 - Attempting to combine hint texts and Don’t know answer options