trialNo

Experiments Surveys & forms

trialNo is a pure metadata column. No display, logic, randomization or scoring behavior reads it. Use it to carry your own trial numbering into the results file. Testable’s actual trial bookkeeping is the auto generated rowNo results column: the design spreadsheet row number (first data row is 2), plus a -rN suffix for rows duplicated via repeat and pick suffixes for wildcard/list generated trials.

Syntax

Put any value you like in the cell, a number or a label. It is never parsed, split, or compared, and is copied into the results exactly as written.

Options

Value	Effect
any value	Copied verbatim into the results row of each saved trial.
empty	Nothing.

There are no reserved values and no uniqueness or ordering requirement enforced anywhere.

Defaults & missing values

If the column is missing from the trial file, it does not appear in the results at all. A cell left blank records no value for its trial.

Works with

• None with other columns. Conditional logic (if/then), jumps and wildcards address trials by spreadsheet row number and label values, never by trialNo.
• The value is saved on completed type=test trials, CFPT trials and form rows, like every other column present in the trial file.

Examples

trialNo	type	stimFormat	stim1	key
101	test	word	LEFT	1
102	test	word	RIGHT	2

The values 101 and 102 appear in the trialNo column of the results; randomization may reorder rows and trialNo lets you recover the design row.

Tips & gotchas

• trialNo plays no role in trial tracking or conditional logic: then targets and %variable[n]% indexes use row numbers and label values instead.
• Because rows can be randomized, trialNo in the results reflects the design row you assigned. The auto added rowNo column already reflects the design spreadsheet row independently (with repeat and list suffixes), so the two are usually redundant if you number rows sequentially.