Reading the answers
The Overview and Responses tabs, what each audience figure counts, and the AI summary of written answers.
Open one of your own forms and it has two tabs of its own.
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Overview | The form's state and settings, how answers arrived over time, the audience figures, and a summary of what people wrote. |
| Responses | Every question with its own numbers, and a switch to the individual answers instead. |
The three audience figures, and what each one counts
They read as a funnel and they are all about the people you sent it to:
| Figure | The population |
|---|---|
| Reached | Everybody the form was shared with, plus anybody who can edit it. This is the denominator. |
| Opened it | How many of *those* people have opened it. Not a count of views. |
| Responded | How many of them answered. The total number of responses is on the line under it. |
Somebody who found the form through the share link is in none of the three - they were never on the list the first figure is about. They get their own line. Folding them in is what used to make this panel read as impossible: more people opening a form than were ever sent it.
On a form that repeats, all of this is about the round you are looking at. Somebody who answered in March is not shown as having answered this month's.
The summary of written answers
For the questions people answer in their own words, Noots reads the answers and says what they are actually telling you. On the Business plan and above.
- It needs at least three answers to a question before it says anything. Below that, a summary would hand back in a sentence exactly what the individual list is withholding.
- Questions asking for personal information are never sent. A question asking for a name, a way to contact somebody, an identifier, a credential, where somebody lives or a sensitive personal matter is left out, and the page names how many it left out rather than quietly summarising fewer.
- Individual answers are checked too, because people put their email address in the "anything else?" box and the question itself cannot know that.
- The numbers, the charts and every individual answer are unaffected. Only the written summary is a paid capability, and a workspace without it sees the same page without that paragraph.
An anonymous form
Two things change, and both are refusals rather than hidden columns:
- Times are coarsened to the day. A form that promises anonymity and then prints
14:02:11beside each answer has broken the promise to the one person it was made against, which is whoever is reading the results. - The list of individual responses is withheld until there are three, and the page says so. With two responses, "the individual answers" and "what those two people said" are the same sentence.
The overall statistics are unaffected - they are the point of an anonymous form.
One answer per person on an anonymous form is enforced with a keyed one-way hash rather than by storing who answered, and the key it uses is never written down. So the application cannot identify a respondent and has no code path that could, and the database on its own cannot either. That is a narrower claim than "nobody could ever", and it is stated narrowly on purpose.
Exporting & deleting
Responses can be deleted by anybody who can edit the form. A deleted response is gone from every figure on both tabs.