Forum Discussion
Forms responses missing when Excel is opened
Dear Forms customers,
Forms for Excel contains a live data connection to your form. Any new response data will be stored in your form, and also be reflected in your workbook. On occasion, the workbook may not contain the latest data for a number of reasons.
If this is the case, Forms provides a new feature, "Sync all responses to a new workbook", in order to “sync” your most recent responses to a new workbook. This new workbook will be stored next to your original workbook on OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online. This will ensure your data is up to date. Learn more about how to get missing data.
Regards,
Zhongzhong
What a mess! What a complete mess! My original Excel spreadsheet was missing lots of responses (blank lines appeared in the spreadsheet where the responses should have been). So I followed the recommendation to synchronise to a new spreadsheet. Hooray, I could see (all?) the missing responses. However, I needed to open the spreadsheet in Excel 2016, but it refused to open. The path in the SharePoint document library was already fairly long and the new name automatically added for the new spreadsheet was really long as well. So I tried renaming the SharePoint folder, but that didn't change anything. Next attempt was to create a new SharePoint folder with a much shorter name and move all my files to that and sync it.
Great I can now open the original forms spreadsheet (with its missing responses) but I can't edit the form. Brilliant, just what I needed (not). All I get is the option to create a new form. I can still get to use the old form but the responses don't seem to get recorded anywhere. In the new spreadsheet (created by syncing to a new spreadsheet) I can see the data but all the Forms options are greyed out.
Right, so let's recreate everything from scratch. I've got nothing else I want to do with my life, after all.
- Zhongzhong_Li
Microsoft
Hi Alan,
Sorry for the late response.
Looks like you have met several critical errors
1 - Missing data in Excel workbook
2 - Forms settings (e.g. anyone with the link could response) takes hours to reflect on customer side
3 - "Sync to new Excel workbook" doesn't work well for you.
It would be great if you could share your form URL with us, so we could have further investigation.
I'll send you a private message to have more detail follow up with you.
Regards,
Zhongzhong
I have recreated everything from scratch and it seems to be working. However, there are a couple of dodgy things about this:
1) The Forms icon on the Excel online spreadsheet can take several minutes to become enabled.2) When I make changes, e.g. to allow people outside my organisation to be able to fill in the forms, it can take hours before some people on the web can use the updated version. For example, I made that change to my form about 3 hours ago and one user down the road from me is still being asked to log in.