You would use the following code:
<p>4. Please share your general comments on your experience with XYZ Company:</p>
<p>
<textarea name="Q4" cols="40" rows="4" wrap="VIRTUAL"></textarea>
</p>
As with the other question types, the Text Area has a Name attribute that represents the data column you want the answers to be inserted into. There are three other optional attributes that can be used: Cols and Rows, and Wrap.
Cols is short for columns. The number entered here represents how wide the Text Area will appear on the respondents' screens.
Rows represents how tall the Text Area will appear on the respondents' screens.
As we discussed with the Text Box questions, these sizes will appear different on different types of computers. Forty columns is probably the widest setting you'd want to use, in order to accomodate all browsers, operating systems and screen resolution settings.
The Wrap attribute contols how the data is wrapped when the response takes up more than one line. Your choices here are Off, Physical and Virtual. We recommend sticking with the Virtual setting. If it's set to Off, the text will not wrap at all for the user. It will create a horizontal scroll bar within the Text Area, and user must do some tricky scrolling to see what they've already written. Physical wraps the response to a new line in the respondent's browser, but it also wraps it in the data file. Depending on how you retrieve the data, you may end up having to do some manual cleaning to get rid of the hard returns. If you use the Virtual setting, it will wrap in the resondent's browser, but will not be wrapped in the data.
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Thursday, August 7, 2008