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Online surveys  (formerly BOS)

Powerful, flexible online surveys

Filtering using multiple criteria ADVANCED

Using the filter Editor, you can filter based on multiple criteria by adding several rows of conditions. For example, you can define a group of respondents who have given a certain answer to one question, as well as a certain answer to another. You can also set up separate filters for each condition and select a combination of them to be applied. Either way, you are combining filters with an ‘and’ statement, meaning that only results that meet all applied filter criteria will be shown.

In some cases it is useful to combine criteria with ‘or’ or ‘not’, or create a more complex filter. For example, you may want to define a group by whether they have given a certain answer to, say, question 1, or a certain answer to question 2. To express these kinds of filters you will need to access the Advanced filtering tab.

To combine multiple criteria using ‘or’ or ‘not’:

  1. On your survey’s Analyse page, click on Add filter in the left-hand menu.
  2. In the Editor tab, set up a filter for the first criterion.
  3. At the bottom right of the filter box, click Add row +.
  4. Set up the filter row for the second criterion.
  5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you have set up a filter row for all the criteria that you wish to combine.example of a filter
  6. Click on the Advanced tab.
  7. The Expression box will contain a series of statements prefaced by the word And.  The ‘And’ means that the filter will only return responses where all of the criteria have been selected.
    example of a filter with two rows
  8. You can change this as follows:
    • Change And to Or.  The filter will return responses where any of the criteria have been selected.
    • Change And to Not.  The filter will return responses where none of the criteria have been selected.  Note:  This will not work for filters on free text questions, because the filter Editor already gives you the option to choose “does not contain”.
  9. Save and enable the filter.