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Anyone else having issues with Excel integration, specifically text fields?

  • 9 February 2024
  • 8 replies
  • 104 views

Beginning this month, all the open text field responses captured by Typeform are adding superfluous quotation marks (“ “ ) to each answer. As you might imagine, this is seriously messing with out patient data collection. 

Apparently this is a known issue (https://www.typeform.com/help/a/excel-online-integration-troubleshooting-limitations-and-other-fa-qs-13618045462292/#h_01HHYAR02T842R2F4BD2C20B2A)

However, we never saw this problem before, and we’ve collected over 4,000 responses!

When I had other issues with Typeform -->Excel, I was advised to create a new sheet. BUT… we have custom pivot tables to analyze the data from the “primary” worksheet. And separate tabs for each therapist. Re-recreating that will take 8-12 hours. Seriously.

Help me, Obi-wan, you’re my only hope.

 

8 replies

Liz
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Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Hi @KDandenell Let me ask our technical team about this. I don’t believe we have a workaround for this, but they will know for sure. 

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.
Liz
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Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Hi again @KDandenell - our lovely tech folks let me know the following: 

The issue with the quotes in the cells is by design. This is done to prevent unwanted and malicious SQL injections into a workbook and via typeform input fields, so we have to add these to secure your workbook.

As a workaround, you can modify the data once it has been passed into your workbook. We suggest that you do not make modifications to the tab that our integration write to, but instead transfer the data to another tab where you can modify it.
Please see this online page for "Transfer Data From One Excel Worksheet to Another Automatically"
And the following on how to Remove Quotes for Text or Strings in Excel: Youtube video here  or this page.
Hopefully this helps!

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.
K
Userlevel 2
Badge +2

Thanks for the update. While I recognize the need to have a certain level of security, it would have been nice to have advanced warning of the change.

The workaround is, to be honest, an additional step in the collection of data that is at odds with the convenience of using Typeform and Excel together. Before the change, we could present custom client snapshots to our therapists using pivot tables. Now someone has to go in and fix the data on a daily basis. If we don’t remove the superfluous characters, the pivot tables do not work. The therapists depend on this information in a timely fashion.

Bottom line, we are now faced with looking for an alternate system or hiring a database developer to create custom reports in Notion. Neither scenario is appealing.

 

Liz
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Hi @KDandenell I checked with our technical team, but this isn’t a new change to the integration - the quotations have been present for at least the last year. Do you happen to know if any changes were made to the form, such as changing the field type?

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.
K
Userlevel 2
Badge +2

Interesting. I haven’t touched the forms for over a year (when we hired the last therapist). The quotation mark issue only appeared after Feb 1, 2024, so I guessed that it was a system change at Typeform (or perhaps Microsoft).

Technology is great, until it isn’t. <shrug>

Liz
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Hi @KDandenell It might also be worth having our tech team take a closer look into this since they can log into your account and also look at the logs. If you want to reach out to them here, you can also reference this post, as I’ve asked them about the issue so they’re familiar. 

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.
K
Userlevel 2
Badge +2

Thanks. I have submitted a request.

Liz
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Let us know what they end up saying, @KDandenell !

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.

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