Note questions in KoboToolbox

Last updated: 21 Mar 2026

Note questions are used to display information within your form without collecting a response. Although they are listed as a question type, note questions do not store any data. Instead, they are used to provide instructions, context, or additional details that help respondents or enumerators understand and complete the form correctly.

You can use note questions to introduce a new section, explain why certain questions are being asked, provide guidance on how to respond, display media, or show the results of hidden calculations or previous responses.

This article explains how to add a Note question in the Formbuilder and how to add styling to your note text.

Adding a note question in the Formbuilder

To add a note question to your form:

1. Click the button.

2. Enter your question label.

3. Click + ADD QUESTION.

4. Choose the Note question type.

Appearances of note questions

By default, note questions appear as simple text in your form.

Enketo web form	KoboCollect

Advanced appearances

When adding notes to your form, you can use Markdown and HTML to style text, add emphasis with bold or italics, create headers of different sizes, change fonts and colors, and add clickable web links.

Note: Text styling can also be applied to questions and choice labels.

Text styling features in the Formbuilder include:

Feature	Formatting
Italics	*italics* or _italics_
Bold	**bold** or __bold__
Hyperlink	[name of link](url)
Headers	# Header 1 (biggest) to ###### Header 6 (smallest)
Emojis	For example, 🙂 😐 🙁 😦 😧 😩 😱
Superscript	100 m<sup>2</sup> turns into 100 m²
Subscript	H<sub>2</sub>O turns into H₂O
Colored text	<span style="color:#f58a1f">orange</span> turns into orange <span style="color:red">red</span> turns into red
Font	<span style="font-family:cursive">cursive</span> turns into cursive <span style="color:red; font-family:cursive">red and cursive</span> turns into red and cursive
Align center	<p style="text-align:center">Centered label</p> centers the text on the screen

Note: Additional formatting features, such as line breaks, bullet lists, and numbered lists, are available only when building your form in XLSForm.