We have a survey we deploy every six months. We download the survey data as a csv to do our analysis using statistical software. The download currently works with the legacy exporter, but does not work with the standard exporter. Customer support indicated that the reason is that our survey is “too long.” I find this surprising. There are approximately 58,000 columns in the exported file due to the looping structure of the survey (with fewer than 20 questions), and the final file size is less than 30 MB, which does not seem unreasonable for a csv file.
Customer support tried to download the data using the standard exporter and wasn't able to do it (only the metadata is exported). They suggest reformatting our survey but the solutions they suggest either won’t work for us (if we allow write-in answers and pipe those forward instead of using the dropdown selections that our loops are based on, we’ll have to spend a significant amount of time cleaning and re-categorizing those write-in answers) or do not seem ideal (splitting the survey into 2 or more instances and linking those). It also doesn’t seem that we should have to dedicate time and resources to revamp a survey that is working for us using the legacy exporter.
With the legacy exporter scheduled to be deprecated in 2021, I'm concerned we won't be able to download our data in the future. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get the standard exporter to function similarly to the legacy exporter? Or any ideas why legacy works but the standard does not?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Best answer by TomG
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