How do I activate, deactivate or archive several surveys at once?

When your account holds a lot of surveys, you do not have to open each one individually to tidy up or to start a new round. In the survey list you can select several surveys and Activate, Deactivate or Archive them in one step. Before anything happens, you see exactly which surveys will change and which will stay as they are.

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Starting selection mode

Open the Surveys section. At the top right, next to Create survey, you will find the Select button. As soon as you click it, the table shows a checkbox in front of every row. Cancel in the same place leaves selection mode again and discards the current selection.

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Selecting surveys

There are three ways to put a selection together:

• Individual rows — tick the surveys you want to change.
• The whole page — the checkbox in the table header (Select all on this page) selects every survey on the page you are currently looking at.
• Everything matching your filters — once all rows on the page are ticked and there are further pages, Select all 128 matching your filters appears as well (with the actual number). This extends the selection to every survey that matches your filters, including the ones you cannot see right now.

A bar appears above the table showing how many surveys are selected, along with the three actions. Clear selection on the right-hand side undoes the selection.

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The three actions

The bar offers these three actions and no others: A bulk action follows exactly the same logic as the same action on a single survey. It does nothing you could not also do one survey at a time through the row menu — it just does it for many surveys at once.

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The confirmation dialog

After you click one of the three actions, a dialog opens that breaks the change down in advance. For archiving it reads, for example:

• 12 inactive → will be archived
• 5 active or scheduled → remain unchanged (deactivate first)
• 3 archived → remain unchanged

Below that you see how many people are assigned to the surveys concerned. For activating it tells you instead how many people will receive an invitation email. To confirm, type the number of surveys that will actually change into the field below To confirm, enter the number of surveys that will be changed. The start button only becomes active once the number matches exactly. This extra step protects you from changing a much larger selection than you intended. If not a single one of the selected surveys can be changed, the dialog says so plainly — for example None of the selected surveys can be archived. In that case there is no start button, only Close.

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What happens after you start

The action runs in the background. The bar above the table shows the progress, for example Archiving … 60%. Honestly then reports the result:

• 12 surveys archived. — everything worked.
• 10 surveys archived, 2 failed. — some surveys could not be changed; the rest were processed.
• Bulk archive failed. Please try again later. — the action could not be carried out.

Selection mode then closes and the list reloads, so you see the new statuses straight away. For very large selections, processing can take longer than the page waits for the result. You then get a message saying the action is still running in the background and that you should refresh the list later. The action is still carried through to the end in that case — there is no need to repeat it.

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What is only available one at a time

Restore and Delete are not available as bulk actions. You still reach both through the menu at the right-hand end of the relevant row:

• Restore brings an archived survey back into the active list. To find it, add Archived to the Status filter — archived surveys are not shown by default.
• Delete removes the survey and all its responses irreversibly. That is why this action is deliberately available for one survey at a time only.

You may also find these articles helpful:

• How do I (de)activate a survey?
• How can I archive surveys which are no longer/not currently in use?
• How can I search for a particular survey?