Configure DeForm CSV Export Formatting

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Multiple Choice and Single Select Questions in DeForm

This guide is mostly relevant for forms or waitlists that include multiple choice, single select, or dropdown questions. These questions allow users to select from a set of possible choices. Multiple choice questions allow users to answer with multiple options from those sets.

An example of a form with multiple choice questions and single select questions might look like this:

Here, DeForm allows you to ask your users What are your favorite fruits? and How do you identify yourself?

The question What are your favorite fruits? has multiple answers and users are allowed to select as many options as they’d like.

The question How do you identify yourself? also has multiple answer options, but users are only allowed to choose one answer. This question in particular also includes an option for Other in case the user wants to input their own answer not included in the pre-defined set.

How DeForm Exports CSV and Spreadsheet Results By Default

By default, DeForm will show you all the answers of these responses in a single column, per-question. Below, you can see that the What are your favorite fruits? answers are all neatly combined into a single column no matter how many answers each user selected in their response.

The advantage of this format is that you can quickly scan your CSV or spreadsheet to find relevant information or patterns in your results.

When you view this CSV in a text editor, you will notice that the values separated by a comma within the same column are grouped between double quotes, like so:

"Apple, Banana, Dragonfruit"

This is the standard for storing multiple values within a single column such that all CSV parsers can reproduce the visual representation correctly.

Export DeForm Responses in Multiple Columns

However, we also provide you with an alternative formatting option in case it’s useful for your data processing needs to see each potential answer option out of the total set of answer options in separate columns, like so:

Even for single select questions where it’s only possible for users to choose one answer option, we can show you one distinct column for each option, and then show you which column the user ended up choosing:

You can turn this advanced option on by going to the DeForm Responses Page and turning on the Split answers into multiple columns option:

Using DeForm Response Formatting with Google Sheets

Currently, DeForm only updates live Google Sheets connections with new responses and does not update any old responses. What this means for you if you’re changing the multiple columns setting is that any time you toggle the setting, only new responses will be updated to the new format.

The best way to solve this problem is to delete the Google Sheets connection, and then re-connect, allowing DeForm to re-populate a brand new Google Sheets with the updated formatting.

If you have any followup questions or feedback, please email us at support@contributionlabs.io!

And check out our upcoming features here: https://deform.canny.io/feature-requests