Prevent enter key from submitting text entry for evaluation

I am having this problem again three years later...

I have three text entry boxes on screen - I do not want the enter key to submit the answers..

HOW do I stop this happening??

Is there a quick way round it?

I have the latest version of storyline.

Hi Rebecca,

If you increase the height of the text entry box to be more than two lines, then the Enter key registers as a carriage return (new line) and does not submit the question. 

Does that help with your setup?

Hi Ren,

I have tried making the text entry bigger, but that doesn't work. Enter still submits the question! I hope I solution can be found.

I am also having this issue. I've read that different questions types might be helpful. Is there any solution for this yet?

Hello Vanessa and welcome to E-Learning Heroes. 😊

When there's a data-entry field on a question slide, pressing the Enter key on the keyboard submits your response for evaluation. In other words, pressing the Enter key on the following question slides is the same as clicking the Submit button.

• Graded—Fill in the Blank
• Graded—Numeric
• Survey—Short Answer 
• Survey—How Many
• Freeform—Text Entry 

You can press Shift+Enter to add line breaks to short-answer surveys and ungraded freeform text-entry questions when the fields are tall enough to allow multiple lines of text.

Hi Annemarie,

Thanks for the additional information. Does Shift+Enter work for you?

Hi Leslie,

When I adjusted it to an essay question, the [enter] button could be pressed without submitting!

Thanks!

That's great, Annemarie. I appreciate you sharing the solution that worked best for your project.

Hi All, I have update my Storyline 360 to the latest version but I'm still having problem with the Enter key not getting the value user type on the text entry. I've set the submit button on the slide & Enter for submit keys. But it doesn't work, when user press Enter key, they're just advancing to next slide. When I want to show their typed value on the last slide, it doesn't show. Can someone help me?

Hi Atikah and welcome to E-Learning Heroes. 😊

We'd be happy to help you.

With your permission, I'd like to take a look at your project file to investigate what's happening. You can share it publicly here, or send it to me privately by uploading it here. I'll delete it when I'm done troubleshooting.

I'm running into a slightly different version of this problem. We present learners with a sentence that has no punctuation and ask them to type the whole sentence into the text entry field with correct punctuation. Some sentences are long enough to need two lines, so we make the text boxes tall enough for that. They are allowed 2 attempts. There is a custom submit button on the slide with a trigger to submit the interaction when user clicks submit button.

If learner enters text and presses submit, all is well.

However, if learner enters text and hits ENTER out of habit, that submits the interaction.

The problem is that the ENTER also registers as a linebreak so even if they enter the correct answer, the extra line break makes the answer register as incorrect. When they go back for their second attempt, the linebreak is still there and very easy to miss, so the learner can easily still get the incorrect feedback layer just because they have a linebreak at the end of their answer.

So we need Storyline to either interpret ENTER = submit or ENTER = text entry, but not both at the same time.