Columns of deleted questions still appearing in responses Excel spreadsheet

Copper Contributor

After editing my form e.g., I first created questions 1-4, and then deleted question 2. When I click on Responses -> Open in Excel, the column for question 2 still appears. How can I remove the column for question 2 such that it does not appear when I open the Excel spreadsheet? Thanks.

3 Replies
If you re-create a new Excel with "Synchronize all responses to a new book" from the Excel menu of the responses, the items will be changed.

@ellieong 

If you have deleted some questions from your survey but the corresponding columns are still appearing in your Excel spreadsheet, it could be because the cells in those columns still contain data. Even if you have deleted the questions from your survey, the responses to those questions would still be saved in the cells in your Excel spreadsheet.

To remove the columns of deleted questions from your Excel spreadsheet, you need to delete the cells that contain the responses to those questions. Here are the steps to do so:

  1. Open the Excel spreadsheet that contains the responses to your survey.
  2. Identify the columns that correspond to the questions you have deleted from your survey.
  3. Select the entire column(s) containing the responses to the deleted questions.
  4. Press the "Delete" key on your keyboard or right-click on the selected cells and choose "Delete" from the context menu.
  5. In the "Delete" dialog box that appears, make sure that the "Entire column" option is selected and click OK.
  6. Repeat steps 3-5 for all the columns corresponding to the deleted questions.

Once you have deleted all the cells containing responses to the deleted questions, the corresponding columns should no longer appear in your Excel spreadsheet. Note that if you have any formulas or references in other cells that refer to the deleted columns, you may need to update those formulas or references accordingly.