Once your questions exist, most day-to-day work happens in the survey editor: changing the running order, previewing the result, reviewing a question's setup, and reusing earlier answers in later questions. This article covers those tasks. For creating questions and editing their text, type, and settings, see Add and Edit a Question.

Everything described here is saved automatically — look for Saved at [time] in the top right. There is no save button.

Note: on an active survey the purple + button is disabled — the survey structure is locked while it is running, so new questions and groups cannot be added until the survey is deactivated.

Reorder questions and groups

Use the Structure sidebar on the left. It lists your whole survey in order: the Welcome screen, each question group with its questions, and the End screen.

1. Open your survey in the survey editor.
2. In the Structure sidebar, drag a question and drop it where you want it — including into a different question group.
3. Groups can be reordered by drag & drop in the same sidebar; a group's questions belong to it, so they move with it.

Questions are numbered on the canvas, so you can confirm the new running order at a glance.

Preview your changes

Click the eye icon in the top right, next to Activate, to preview the whole survey and click through it exactly as a participant will. You can preview as often as you like before activating.

To check a single question, preview the survey and navigate to its page — the survey editor's preview always covers the whole survey; there is no dedicated per-question or per-group preview.

Question overview

In the classic interface, the Question list and Question summary pages collected a question's key facts on separate screens. In the survey editor, that information lives where you work:

• The canvas shows every question in order, numbered, with its full text. Each question card has copy and trash icons in its bottom-right corner for duplicating or deleting it.
• The Question settings panel on the right shows the selected question's configuration under its Simple and Advanced tabs: the question code (for example Q001), type, mandatory state (On/Soft/Off), the Show in statistics setting, and the Condition designer.

A searchable table of all questions with bulk actions (the classic Question list) has no direct equivalent in the survey editor.

Reuse answers from a previous question

You can insert a participant's earlier answer into the text of a later question — for example, "You chose {Q001}. Why?" — to make follow-ups feel personal. The placeholder is replaced with the actual answer when the participant reaches that question.

References use the question code of the earlier question, which you can look up in its Question settings panel. In LimeSurvey this piping is handled by ExpressionScript placeholders you type into the question text. The toolbar's Placeholder fields menu only inserts participant and survey fields — for a previous answer, enter the reference yourself as the question code in curly brackets. For the reference to resolve, the earlier question must appear on a page before the question that uses it.

Using the classic editor?

If your installation still uses the classic admin interface:

• Reorder: go to Settings → Reorder questions/question groups, drag items into place, and save. Or, in the Structure tab, make sure the lock icon is unlocked, then drag questions or groups by the hamburger icon. Conditions on a question can block reordering — change or delete them first.
• Preview one question: open the question's summary or edit page and click Preview question in the top bar.
• Question list: go to Settings → Question list for a searchable table (ID, order, code, text, type, group, mandatory) with edit, preview, summary, and delete buttons, plus bulk actions via Selected question(s)....
• Insert a previous answer: use the placeholder wizard (the lime-between-brackets icon) in the rich-text editor; it lists questions from earlier pages.