Using a response property to create a character counter
Often, a questionnaire contains questions that invite the participant to enter comments. In an online questionnaire, these questions have a maximum number of characters that can be entered. You can create a character counter to let participants keep track of the comment length.
You can choose whether the character counter displays:
- the number of characters remaining
- the total number of characters available
- the number of characters they have used.
In Snap Desktop, the character count is added as a Response property. This feature is only available for Open Ended questions.
Adding a character counter
- Open the survey in the Questionnaire window. Make sure that you are in Design mode
and that the toolbar topic is set to Font.
- Place the cursor at the point where you wish to insert the character counter. In the example, the character count is added to the footnote of the Open Ended question.

- Click Insert and select Response Property from the menu. This opens the New embedded response property dialog.

- In Property, select the counter type.
- Response Count shows the number of characters that the participant has entered
- Characters Left shows the number of characters remaining in the response. This is the default.
- Max Count shows the maximum number of characters allowed in the response
- Click OK. The counter type is displayed in curly brackets; {count}, {left} or {max}, to show that it is a text-substituted field.

- When the participant answers the question they will see the character count change as they enter their comments.

The maximum length of a response or the size of a response is set in the Variable properties of the question. By default the maximum length is 9999 characters.