Forum Discussion

Beverly Hague's avatar
Beverly Hague
Copper Contributor
Aug 27, 2018

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 suc...
microsoft forms
Damien_Rosario's avatar
Damien_Rosario
Silver Contributor
Aug 28, 2018

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

  • Beverly Hague's avatar
    Beverly Hague
    Copper Contributor
    Aug 28, 2018

    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

    • Damien_Rosario's avatar
      Damien_Rosario
      Silver Contributor
      Aug 28, 2018

      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

      • Beverly Hague's avatar
        Beverly Hague
        Copper Contributor
        Aug 29, 2018

        Thanks Damien, I had a user email me all of his responses. There are 7 long answer prompts. I copy and pasted each of his answers into Word and the character count for each answer was under 4000. I really appreciate your assistance thus far.

  • BB999's avatar
    BB999
    Copper Contributor
    Jun 08, 2019

    Damien_Rosario 

     

    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. 

Resources