Sunday, November 27, 2011

yogi_Make The Column Headers And Answers Correspond After Changing Order of The Answers In Form Responses Sheet

Yogi Anand, D.Eng, P.E.                                         Google Spreadsheet                            www.energyefficientbuild.com
This has been an issue with Google Forms and there was a recent discussion on this in the following thread:
Need to change order of form responses in linked spreadsheet 
As I had stated in that thread and I will check out whether my proposed solutions work ... so when I started checking it out today ... I was pleasantly surprised -- there is no need for a fix ... when the order of the question in the Form Responses is changed the Form Responses are logged in correctly in the right columns ... Bingo!
This doesn't mean that all situations ... all eventualities have been taken care of ... but this part as we know of is fixed -- a huge THANKS to Google Engineers for this!
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here is the Form ... please note the Form had been EDITed and the questions were rearranged so that the order of the questions does not correspond with those of the column headers in Sheet1 (the so called Form Responses sheet) ... so in essence, even though questions in the Form can be rearranged, and even the answers columns in Sheet1 can be rearranged independent of each other, the responses from Form submittals are correctly logged in appropriate columns.



and here is the Form Responses sheet ... please note that the Answer columns have been rearranged and the order of the Answers columns is not the same as the order of the Question columns in Google Form. However when a Form is submitted the entries are logged in the right column ... Bingo!



2 comments:

  1. How did you "move" the columns in the sheet? If you try cut.paste, there is not just a "warning." Google Sheets simply refuses to allow it and says "cannot cut from form data. Use copy instead". But if you try copy/paste, you cannot then go back and delete the original column (Google Form won't allow it and has a similar message about not being able to delete form data) so you end up with duplicate columns.

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    Replies
    1. I know this is probably OBE by now, but you might try unfreezing row 1 before attempting to rearrange the columns. Don't forget to freeze row 1 again after you are done.

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