responseOther

Surveys & forms

Adds an “Other” choice with a free-text input to a type=form choice question. Any non-empty cell turns the Other option on, and the cell value is used verbatim as the Other option’s label.

Use it for “Other (please specify)” style escape options on radio, checkboxes, and dropdown questions.

Syntax

Type the label you want the Other option to show, for example Other (please specify). The cell value IS the displayed label: no splitting, no keyword parsing, and no %var% variable substitution is applied to it.

Options

Value	Effect
empty cell	No Other option
any other text	Other option shown, labeled with that exact text, with a text input that appears when selected

There is no boolean on/off semantics: 1 shows an option labeled “1”, 0 shows an option labeled “0” (it does not disable the feature).

Defaults & missing values

• If the column is missing or the cell is left empty, the question has no Other option.
• The text the participant types into the Other input is what gets saved as the response.
• Because the typed text is not one of the defined answer choices, an Other response is recorded with a responseCode of NA.

Works with

• responseType: only radio, checkboxes and dropdown honor it. rank, likert, slider, box, comment and stars ignore it entirely.
• responseRows: combined with radio or checkboxes, the question becomes a matrix, which never shows an Other option, so responseOther has no effect there. Combined with dropdown, each per-row dropdown gets its own Other option.
• responseOptionsRandom: the Other item is separate from the choice list, so it is never shuffled.
• key scoring: an Other answer is compared as the typed text, so it normally scores as incorrect unless the key matches the typed text.
• JSON forms (form column set): this column has no effect there.

Examples

Radio with a custom-labeled Other:

type	head	responseType	responseOptions	responseOther
form	How did you hear about us?	radio	Friend;Advert;Social media	Other (please specify)

If the participant selects Other and types “podcast”, the saved response is podcast and the responseCode is NA.

Checkbox question mixing Other with an exclusive option:

type	head	responseType	responseOptions	responseOther
form	Which devices do you own?	checkboxes	Phone;Laptop;Tablet;None of these:exclusive	Other device

None of these is rendered last as an exclusive checkbox; Other device appears as an additional checkbox with a text field.

Tips & gotchas

• The value is a label, not an on/off flag. responseOther=0 still shows an Other option labeled “0”; only an empty cell disables it.

Caution

On a checkboxes question, when a participant selects Other and types text, the typed text can replace the whole saved response for that question, so other checked options may be dropped from the results.

• There is no default label: no built-in “Other (please specify)” text exists. Whatever is in the cell is shown verbatim.
• :exclusive is not parsed in this column; it would appear literally in the label.