Hi smithcat,

Any skip patterns that involve something more complex than directing participants to an item in the same questionnaire file based on their choice of a single response option must involve a response.xls file. As such, response.xls files are the tool of choice for the parts of your study that require skips based on situations like participant responses to two or more items. However, as I wrote earlier, response.xls files can introduce delays if large numbers of variables are used in them because excel goes through every item in the response.xls file to see if it can update any variable values every time a participant gets a new item.