Activating a survey

Once you are happy with the structure of your survey, you can activate it by clicking on the Activate this survey button:

Activating a survey does a number of things:

• It creates a separate database table where all survey responses are stored, a new entry being added for each new collected survey response.
• It allows people to manually enter data into that table, and gives you access to other features for the survey, including browse and token facilities.
• It gives you access to the "survey participants" feature. Once a survey is activated, you may allow everyone to fill it in or just a certain list of respondents (see the Survey participants wiki subsection for more details ).

Before you activate a survey you should note that:

• When the survey is initialized, you can change the text for questions, answers, the survey etc, but not the type of question or the type of answer.
• You cannot add new questions or delete questions. Nor can you add answers to any of the array or multiple choice questions - however you can add answers to the basic list type questions.
• If you deactivate (not expire) the survey, it will move the responses to a backup table and lose participation information but you will again be able to add new questions and groups and to modify parameters.

If the Activate this survey button is disabled, then your survey is not yet capable of being activated (for example if you have no questions created yet). Once clicking on this icon, LimeSurvey will run a quick consistency check to make sure that your survey will work properly.