Customizing Survey Style

Survey Galaxy makes it easy to customize the survey style and allows modification of the survey's display attributes such as the colour of the background, font styles and the text size and colour.

To minimize the number of display attributes that need modifying it is recommended that before starting to customize a survey style a predefined style that is closest to the style that you require is chosen.

To choose a predefined style use the 'Style' select box to choose from the predefined system styles or previously defined personal styles.

If you select a predefined system style and want to customize it you will be required to provide a new name and a copy of the system style will be made.

If you select a predefined personal style you will be able to modify the existing style but please note that if the style has been applied to other surveys any changes to the style will be applied to all surveys using that style. If you do not want to affect other surveys you must make a copy of the personal style and provide a new style name.

The customize style facility is activated from the Composer's Preview Pane Mode panel by clicking on the 'Styles' option.

Setting the Default Attributes

To change a survey's common display attributes such as the default font and background colour click on the 'Defaults' button.

A reminder that choosing a style closest to the required style will save you considerable time will be displayed.

Click on 'OK' to acknowledge the message and continue.

If the selected predefined style is a system style you will be asked to provide a name for the new style, enter a name and then click on the 'Apply' button.

You can select any of the customizable elements from the 'Elements' list box, because the 'Defaults' button was selected the element will automatically be set to 'Survey Background (Default Settings)'.

To change the survey's background colour click on the 'Back Colour' select button.

A colour selection tablet will be displayed, click on the required colour.

Then click on the 'OK' button.

To change the default font for the survey click on the 'Font' selection box.

Choose from the available fonts the font required.

The sample box will show the effects of the display attribute selections made and you can continue with other changes such as the font size, weight, colour and alignment.

When you have completed all the changes click on the 'Apply' button to implement the changes.

You can continue by selecting other survey elements from the 'Element' selection and click on the 'OK' button when all the changes have been made.

The Composer's Preview Pane display will show the effects of the changes made.

If you want to change the display attribute for a particular part of the survey, while the Preview Pane Mode is set to 'Styles' simply click on the area that you want to change, for example if you wanted to change the style of a grid table click on the part of the grid that you want to change:

This will automatically display the style control box and automatically select the 'Grid Headings' element. Make the necessary changes and click on the 'Apply' button.

Likewise if you want to change the colour of a grid's body, click anywhere on the grid's body.

Make the necessary selections and then click on 'Apply'.

The survey will be re-displayed showing the new grid body display attributes:-

Survey Galaxy groups the elements that make up a survey and will automatically apply any changes that are made to one element's display attribute to all the similar elements making the process quick and simple, in the above example if the survey contained other grids, or further grids were added, they would all inherit the grid display attributes.

Because similar elements are grouped, if for example we wanted the questions in our sample survey to stand out more, we might want to increase the size of the font.

With the elements grouped we do not need to change the display attribute one by one for each individual question, instead we can click on any part of any question, here we have clicked on part of question 6:-

The display attribute box for that element type, in this case the Questions will be displayed. For the example we will increase the font size and click on 'Apply' for the change to take effect.

The composer's survey display will be re-displayed with all the questions adopting the new font size:

To deactivate the 'Styles' facility set the Preview Pane Mode to 'Normal'.

With the Preview Pane mode set to 'Normal' the display attributes will be locked and you will be able to click anywhere on the preview pane display without triggering the display attribute dialogue box, this will allow you to test your survey design.

Selecting Styles

Once a customized style has been saved it will be added to the predefined personal styles library and can then be applied to any existing or future survey by selecting the style using the Composer's 'Style' pull down list.