I've set up a survey in Forms to be used to count attendance for an organization on a weekly basis. There are 7 different questions to input a number for the count in different sections. I've set the restrictions on all the questions, and when I pull up the survey on my phone browser I can see the answer box says "The value must be a number." But when the answers are submitted, they are being changed to text; the Excel spreadsheet shows the answer is '59, instead of 59. The cell format also shows that it should be number. The problem is that I have some formulas built in the Excel spreadsheet recording the answers, and they obviously cannot work if the answers are text. Is anyone else dealing with this problem? Any ideas how to fix it?

Movaan I was working on a responses that has number stored as text, and, since I needed to do a calculation based on the responses (to utilized its data and save time from moving the responses to another worksheet) I would need to convert the number stored as text into a number or value for a calculation to work. So I tried using the CLEAN function as you had suggested, though it removes the unprintable character ( ' ), there's still a need to convert the results into a values manually.I found this VALUE ie. =VALUE(text or cell) function which convert the number stored as text to value. This can also be a work around.All the best.

Wenjun Gong - Any update to this issue?We would like to export Form responses to Excel then use a PivotTable to analyze the results but cannot without cleaning the data from text to number (as others have mentioned). Our surveymonkey export works much better.It's possible the Form was created with text fields, then edited to add the number requirement later. Maybe that will help your team reproduce and fix??Unfortunately, creating a new survey is not ideal solution, the link has already been shared.

mrVazil are you still having the same issue? It is ongoing for me.

alyssat I use as a work around CLEAN-function in a new column (ie. =CLEAN([@Number])*1). This way you will have usable number that won't break your functions.

Movaan While the issue can be resolved with the CLEAN formula, it is an extra step that should not be needed. The Form is setup with that field requiring a number and it should export into Excel as a number, like it used to. My problem still exists and requires the recalculations as my Excel data is being imported into an Access Database. When the number field remained a number this was not an issue.

Responses changing from number to text | Microsoft Community Hub

35 Replies

alyssat
Copper Contributor
Apr 25, 2020
dfox74 I am having the same issue and it is very frustrating. Anyone figure out a solve?
- Movaan
  Copper Contributor
  Apr 27, 2020
  alyssat I use as a work around CLEAN-function in a new column (ie. =CLEAN([@Number])*1). This way you will have usable number that won't break your functions.
  - K_L_I_E_F
    Copper Contributor
    Nov 04, 2020
    Movaan I was working on a responses that has number stored as text, and, since I needed to do a calculation based on the responses (to utilized its data and save time from moving the responses to another worksheet) I would need to convert the number stored as text into a number or value for a calculation to work.
    So I tried using the CLEAN function as you had suggested, though it removes the unprintable character ( ' ), there's still a need to convert the results into a values manually.
    I found this VALUE ie. =VALUE(text or cell) function which convert the number stored as text to value. This can also be a work around.
    All the best.
DowneyECISD
Copper Contributor
Oct 31, 2019
dfox74 I am still having this issue with a form that worked great all of last year.
- dfox74
  Brass Contributor
  Oct 31, 2019
  DowneyECISD Me too. Every week I have to go in and retype the entry in the Microsoft Excel results as numbers, then the sheet will calculate correctly.
dfox74
Brass Contributor
Oct 01, 2019
This still hasn’t been fixed. Waiting for Microsoft to address it.
Movaan
Copper Contributor
Oct 01, 2019
dfox74

Having the same issues on multiple different Forms + Excel pairings, except for one. Still haven't figured out the difference.
- dfox74
  Brass Contributor
  Oct 31, 2019
  Movaan Did you ever find a reason for the difference for why the one is working as expected?
  - Movaan
    Copper Contributor
    Nov 21, 2019
    dfox74 I've just decided to forget this and use CLEAN-function to convert my answers.
mrVazil
Copper Contributor
Sep 03, 2019
I have the same issue. It changed all of a sudden a couple weeks ago and now I need to change all values manually to number before I can import the sheet into access.

Please microsoft, fix this...
- dfox74
  Brass Contributor
  Oct 31, 2019
  mrVazil are you still having the same issue? It is ongoing for me.

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Responses changing from number to text

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