Forum Discussion
Forms responses missing when Excel is opened
I have created a Form in Office 365 Business and now have 81 responses. When I try to open the responses in Excel, it only shows that I have 1 response. Please advice.
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
I have this same problem. Created an Excel Sheet in OneDrive, and used Forms for Excelt to create a form. At first it took responses just fine and added them to both the Form and the Spreadsheet in OneDrive, but now it no longer updates the Spreadsheet and I am missing some responses that are still in the form.
For now I'm going back to using Google Forms since they're much less clunky and more reliable than Office 365's Excel Forms are, and will also be going with GSuite over Office 365 for my business clients' email hosting due to reliably.- Zhongzhong_Li
Microsoft
Hi Erik,
I'm sorry for the error, could you please send the form URL for me, so we could troubleshoot.
Regards,
Zhongzhong
- Thanks for the quick response! I've sent you a link to the form, but can't share the Excel Sheet itself due to Office 365 account restrictions. Let me know if you need anything else, as I'm quite technical when it comes to this kind of stuff having worked in IT for 10+ years.
- Zhongzhong_Li
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
Dear Microsoft,
When are you going to sort this out, please? I am again missing at least one response from my Excel spreadsheet. I know this because I demonstrated to someone how to use the Excel form. They got an acknowledgement of their input and when I got into Edit Form --> Responses I can see the item I added, but when I click on "Open in Excel" the spreadsheet opens in Excel Online missing that data.
This is a mess. Please sort it out so it works properly. Your post says, "On occasion, the workbook may not contain the latest data for a number of reasons." It's time to sort those reason out, don't you think?
Hi Zhongzhong Li,
We are currently not able to view all of the responses to our form in Excel, could you please advise?
Please let me know if you need any further information for this.
Thanks,
Rachel
- Zhongzhong_LiHi Rachel,
Based on the log we had for the URL you have shared, it shows your form hasn't connected with an Excel Online file, it is a standard form with "Download Excel".
Could you share me the actual error you have received?
Regards,
Zhongzhong
Hi Zhong ZhongZhongzhong_Li
My sharepoint form was created using Form for Excel in Folder A, which means that the responses from the Sharepoint form syncs to an excel file. However, I need to move this excel file to another folder, lets call is Folder B.
When I move the excel file to Folder B, new responses to the form does not go into the excel file anymore. The best solution I managed to find so far is to use the option "sync all responses to a new workbook"to a new excel file. But the new excel file is again created in Folder A instead of Folder B.
Is there any solution or way to relink the excel file to the Sharepoint form after I moved the excel file? Pls let me know urgently. Thanks!
- Zhongzhong_Li
Rele_2018 we use FileID to identify the file in SharePoint. If folder A and folder B are in the same SharePoint site, then you should be free to move the file, and the data sync connection keep working. If you met problem, please let me know, it should be a bug.
However, if folder A and folder B are in different SharePoint sites, we don't have good solution here (you could sync data into another workbook via Flow).
"Sync data to a specific file" is in our backlog. But I'm not sure if x-site file is in the scope.
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.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.
- Zhongzhong_Li
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 same problem: some responses are showing only on Forms web user interface, not in Excel files. My files were created with Excel Online (in OneDrive) then added forms with Forms for Excel. I have 12 files with forms. During one hour, two persons answered with mobile phones and the other response can be found in Excel file while the other response is only on Forms. Even if I open the file on Forms using link "Open in Excel". the other response is still missing. Some files received both responses. I already contacted local IT support (and received no response) and tried to contact Microsoft helpdesk by phone (they asked to contact local IT support). If synchronization between Forms and Excel is unreliable, then it should at least ask "Would you like to add missing responses to Excel?", when I open the Forms responses using the link "Open in Excel" on Forms.
- Zhongzhong_Li
Hi Tim,
Could you send me your form URL? I could help connect to the engineering team for troubleshooting.
Regards,
Zhongzhong
- I am experiencing the same issues, where I open the the Excel spreadsheet through Forms "Open in Excel" and am missing responses. Is this a system wide issue, and is there a solution?
I am experiencing the same issues, where I open the the Excel spreadsheet through Forms "Open in Excel" and am missing responses. Is this a system wide issue, and is there a solution?
I don't know if this makes a difference but after I checked to make sure that the form was working and onpened it in excel the first time, I then deleted the spreadsheet out of my OneDrive. If this is what caused the problem, is there away to get the data onto a spreadsheet now? Thanks!
To confirm, are you saying that you created the Form from an Excel workbook in OneDrive, or that you exported your results to OneDrive and deleted that?
I exported from forms to one drive anf then deleted the spreadsheet out of onedrive.
I am having the same problem. The form has responses but the Excel spreadsheet is completely blank.
Having this issue as well.
I am experiencing the same Issue, it seems like a specific Form is linked to a specific Excel sheet and if you change anything manually in the Excel sheet it might break the possibility for the Form application to save any data in the Excel sheet.
I expected it to create a new Excel sheet if it cant save or find the original Excel sheet. But that's not the case but should solve the issue for most of us.
- Zhongzhong_Li
Hi Emanuel Foglander, Maria Kilgore, Nate Kennedy, Timothy Denton, Erik Michael and Evan Raiewski,
Thanks for reaching out and sorry for the error for your Forms and Excel workbook.
Do you mind to send me a private mail with your form URL, so I could ask our engineers to follow up?
Regards,
Zhongzhong
If you click the export to excel button the link will flash and be redirected. But if you copy and past it then change the false at the end to a true it will open a new spreadsheet that will have all your data in it. This is the only work around I have found. But you will have all your data this way.
Example
data. https://forms.office.com/Pages/RedirectToExcelPage.aspx?id=RgHwM8xv6Um1aHiWswadRM6biPXhOnlKtde69MV1dHQUFYT1g5VzFUMjBPR0QxOUdQTi4u&forceReExport=false - change this false to a true
I hope this helps some of you!
Just ran into this problem last week and now again today. I have 4 broken Forms I'm using for student assessments. Zhongzhong_Li, I pm'd you with the URLs
- Hi, I'm having the same problem. My form populated the Excel database (in OneDrive) for the first 16 responses. I tried copying the data from OneDrive and something must have happened to the connection. I can see new responses in the form, but not in the Excel sheet. I urgently need to be able to fix this. Thanks!
