You’ve outgrown your survey tool. Maybe the price went up again, or the reports never answer the question your boss actually asks. You’ve found something better.
Then you remember the three years of NPS sitting in the old account. Every quarterly review compares this quarter with the last one. If the history stays behind, next quarter’s review starts from zero.
That fear keeps a lot of teams on tools they’d rather leave. It doesn’t have to. Moving the history is mostly a matter of doing a few things in the right order.
1. Export everything before you cancel anything
Do this first, while you still have access. Look for the raw response export: one row per response, one column per question. Summary reports and PDFs won’t help you here, because you can’t load a chart into a new tool.
Download a CSV or Excel file for every survey you want to keep. Check how long your old tool keeps data after you cancel, and don’t cancel until you’ve checked that the import worked.
2. Rebuild the survey before you bring the answers over
Most tools load old answers into a survey you’ve already built. So build it first, and build it the same way:
- Same questions, same wording. If the question changed, the trend is comparing two different questions.
- Same scales. A 1–5 rating can’t be merged with a 1–10 one. NPS should stay 0–10.
- Same answer options, spelled the same way. “Very satisfied” in the old file has to match “Very satisfied” in the new survey.
If you plan to change a question, do it after the history is in, so the change shows up as a change.
3. Keep the dates. This is the one that matters most
Your trend line is built from when each response came in. If the dates don’t come across, every old response lands on the day you imported it, and three years of history becomes one very busy Tuesday.
So find the column with the response date (often “Start Date”, “Submitted At” or “Timestamp”) and make sure it goes into the new tool’s date field. “03/04/2026” means March 4 in the US and April 3 almost everywhere else. A good tool asks which one your file uses. If yours doesn’t, write dates year first, as 2026-03-04, and there’s nothing to guess.
4. Clean the file
A few minutes here saves a failed import:
- One row per response. Delete total rows, blank rows and the extra header rows some tools add.
- Take out your own test responses. You’ll know them: “test”, “asdf”, your own email.
- Mark partial responses. If someone only answered half, say so in the file, or they’ll be counted as complete.
- Check multi-answer questions. Some tools put each option in its own column, others put all the choices in one cell. Find out what the new tool expects.
- Save in the format the new tool asks for. If it wants a comma-separated CSV, check that your spreadsheet didn’t save it with semicolons, which Excel does in many European countries. When in doubt, Excel (.xlsx) avoids the problem.
5. Try a small file first
Copy the header row and the first 20 responses into a new file and import that. Then look at the result: are the scores right, are the dates in the right months, did the multi-answer questions come through?
If something’s off, you’ve lost five minutes, not an afternoon. Once the sample looks right, import the rest.
6. Check the trend, not just the totals
The count of responses matching is a good start. The real test is whether last year still looks like last year. Pick two old periods you remember, such as last year’s Q3 and Q4 NPS, and check the new tool shows the same scores. If they match, the history made it.
What won’t come across
Be realistic about what a file can carry. Uploaded files and attachments usually stay behind, and so do details like the respondent’s device, location or the campaign link they came through. Old dashboards and saved reports don’t move either: you’ll rebuild the views you need, which is a good moment to drop the ones nobody read.
How SurveyRock does it
SurveyRock loads old responses into a survey you’ve built, in four steps: Upload, Map, Preview, Import. You’ll find Import on the survey’s Respondent List.
- Start from the right questions. Rebuild the survey by hand or bring its questions in with Import Survey, which reads a Word (.docx) or text file, then load the answers into it.
- Your file: CSV or Excel (.xlsx), up to 10 MB, first sheet only. A CSV can use commas, semicolons or tabs between columns, so a file saved by a European copy of Excel can go in as it is.
- Mapping: columns are matched to questions by their titles, and you can change any match or skip a column. Choices are matched by their text, ignoring capitals. Answers spread over several columns can be combined for choice, ranking and grid questions.
- Dates: map your date column to Start Time (and Completion Time if you have it), and the history lands in the right weeks, months and quarters. If your dates look like 03/04/2026, SurveyRock asks whether your file writes the day or the month first, and never guesses. If a date like 13/04/2026 settles it, that order is picked for you to check. If you map neither date, it warns you that every response would be dated the day you import.
- Preview shows the first five rows of the columns you mapped, as they are in your file, and checks every row of the file before you import. It tells you how many rows will go in and lists the first 20 that won’t, with the reason for each. Rows that can’t be imported are skipped, and you can download a report of all of them afterwards.
- It doesn’t eat your plan. Imported responses don’t count against your plan’s response limit, and import is on every plan for Editors and above.
Once the history is in, on the Team plan and up, compare results over time puts this quarter beside last quarter on each NPS, rating and choice card, old responses included.
One thing to plan for: there’s no one-click undo. Imported responses can be deleted from the Respondent List by an admin or owner, so the test-file step above is worth the five minutes.