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If your survey has skip logic, where a question may apply only to a subset of respondents, you can use permanent filters to limit the element's view to just those respondents who were shown the question.

## Example

For example, a survey asks respondents for their specialty in **S1**. The survey has a skip pattern where "What grade nurse are you? (**S2**) is only shown to respondents who answered "Practice Nurse" in **S1.**

60% of respondents in **S2** count as \[NA\] because they were not shown the question. Press on the value "Practice Nurse" in **S1** and you'll see all those respondents answered **S2**.

## Apply permanent filters

In the example above, we press filtered for "Practice Nurse" in **S1**. This defines a scenario where the relevant subset of respondents is selected (see [Press to query tutorial](/view-access/click-to-query)).

We can apply this filter to **S2** only. This will permanently limit the element to only those respondents who were shown the question.

Press the edit icon (blue circle) and select "Filters..." from the [context menu](http://help.protobi.com/newusers/basic-navigation-in-protobi#Context%20menu-8):

In the Filters dialog select "Apply current filters" and press Ok:

The element is now permanently limited to Nurses, and this is automatically labeled in the footnote:

**Note**:

-   The element filter is applied in addition to any global and current filters that are selected in the project.  
-   Filters applied to a group (square icon) are recursively set for child elements within the group.
-   You can override the automatic footnote by pressing on it to directly edit the text.

## Clear filters

To clear a filter, select "Clear filters" from the Filters dialog.

## Editing the filter in JSON

Filters can be also be edited using the "Edit JSON..." option in the context menu.  This can be useful for advanced cases.

For example, the above **S2** filter will have the "filter" attribute set using the MongoDB logic:

### Copy the filter to another element

You can highlight the entire filter attribute and copy it into the JSON Editor for other elements that follows the same skip pattern.

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