Forum Discussion
Limit on Long Answer?
Users have been reporting issues with 2 of the long answer questions on our Form. There are 5 other long answer questions and they seem to be fine. What is strange is some users have been able to successfully submit with those questions being answered but many more are reporting they get a message saying they have exceeded a limit and need to shorten their answers. Are there limitations other than the 4000 characters on the long answer responses? Any suggestions on how to proceed? We are expecting quite a few responses on this and would like to resolve it before we keep getting more users reporting the issue.
12 Replies
We have recently experienced the same problem at the University of Houston and the limit is of great concern to our Internal Audit department. If Microsoft cannot fix Forms they should at least show TOTAL NUMBER OF CHARACTERS and NUMBER OF CHARACTERS USED so that a respondent knows they have a limit and knows when they are reaching that limit.
Hi Beverly
Long answers can only do under 4000 characters. It's currently not allowable to go beyond that.
My thoughts to combat this are:
1. Instruct users to be concise and to note a 4000 character limit.
2. You can try to break the question down into smaller questions (1a, 1b, 1c, etc) which would avoid this problem.
Best wishes with your form!
Cheers
Damien
Good morning. If Microsoft cannot fix Forms at least they should be able to show the NUMBER OF CHARACTERS AVAILABLE and the NUMBER OF CHARACTERS USED as a respondent types in a reply. The way the other survey tools do.
Hi BB999
I agree with you and I see there's some limited advocacy on UserVoice to advocate for this request.
If we can get traction to support the link below, it would make a great addition to Forms (I've voted to support this).
Cheers
Damien
Hi Damien,
Users have indicated they have shortened their responses to under 4000 characters (which is what we want anyway) but they are still experiencing the issue. Does the character limit include spaces? Are there any other limitations with what characters are used or paragraphs etc.?
Thanks,
Beverly
Hi Beverly
Yes spaces are also characters so it would count towards their limit.
I would also suggest checking with users to see if they are actually checking for character count versus word count in case there is any confusion there.
Out of curiousity, how are they measuring the character count? Do they put the text in Word, see the count, and then copy it over to the form?
Cheers
Damien
