Publishing and sharing

Publishing takes a snapshot of everything in the builder right now — every question, page, logic rule, calculation and theme choice — and seals it into a new, numbered version. That snapshot is what the public link shows from that moment on.

Four things happen in that one click:

This is the part that surprises people the first time: once a form has been published once, further edits in the builder change the draft only. The live form — the one respondents actually see — does not move until you publish again. The builder shows Unpublished changes the whole time the two differ, so you always know whether what you are looking at matches what is live.

This is exactly what makes it safe to rework a live form over an afternoon — reordering questions, rewriting a confusing label, trying a different theme — without a respondent ever meeting a half-finished form mid-edit. Nothing reaches them until you choose to publish again, deliberately, the same way scribbling on your desk copy doesn't reprint the ones already handed out.

Most edits are completely safe to make at any time, even on a form that already has responses — adding a question, rewording a label, changing the theme. Two specific edits are worth pausing on first, because of how they interact with responses that already exist.

Deleting a question.Past responses keep their answers and still display them correctly — nothing is erased retroactively. But the question disappears from every new response from now on, and from the export's columns. If your real goal is just to stop asking it going forward while keeping it available to bring back later, hiding it with a rule is usually the better move than deleting it outright.

Changing an option's stored value.Think of the value as a barcode and the label as the price sticker printed over it — respondents only ever see the label, but what actually gets stored and counted is the value underneath. Relabelling “Andhra Pradesh” to fix a typo is completely safe. Changing its underlying value, though, means every past response that already used the old value is now holding a code the current form doesn't recognise — the equivalent of every earlier barcode scan pointing at a product that no longer exists on the shelf. Change labels freely; leave values alone once real responses depend on them.

Once a form is live, its public link and a shareable QR code are one click away from the builder's toolbar — handy for a printed poster or a field visit where typing a long URL on a phone isn't practical. There is nothing else to configure: the link works for anyone unless you have specifically turned on sign-in or a password requirement in Settings.

If a form should stop accepting responses — the survey window closed, the programme ended — resist the urge to delete it. A form sits in exactly one of four states, and two of them exist precisely for this: to tell a visitor the form is no longer open, rather than showing them what looks like a broken link.

Can I keep editing a form after I publish it?

Yes. The draft stays editable, and respondents keep seeing the published version until you publish again.

Why are published form versions immutable?

So each response stays readable against the exact wording of the version its respondent saw.