When exporting data from your Research Console, each question receives a column in the generated Excel file in addition to the automatically populated fields such as start and end time.  In addition, multi-select questions (where more than one option is allowed to be selected) have their options split into columns with a ‘1′ or a ‘0′ indicating if the options was selected or not.  With longer surveys and surveys with multi-select questions, the number of columns can quickly add up to more than 256 columns.

A limitation of Microsoft Excel 2003 is that it can’t support worksheets containing more than 256 columns.  With this new feature, when this occurs, your exported workbook will automatically be split into multiple worksheets to compensate for this limitation.  The system will create as many worksheets (parts) as necessary to keep the number of columns to under 256 in each.  It will also ensure that splits only occur on question boundaries (i.e. a multi-select question won’t be split across two worksheets).

In each worksheet, the first two columns will be duplicated: Response ID and Fieldworker.  This will allow you to follow a single response easily from one part to another. 

We hope this new feature helps you in managing long surveys.