Back to the Data Export Overview

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• The Form Export Edit page is broken down into three parts:
  • Export Settings
  • Form Settings
  • Privacy Settings

Export Settings

• Change the name of your export in the "Export Name:" field. The will be the name displayed in the list of exports and should use keywords to identify the type of information in the report.
• Select the desired default file type using the drop-down option.  There are four types available: Excel 2007, Excel (older versions), CSV (Zip file), Web Page (Excel Dashboards).
  
  
  
  

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• Automatically convert dates for excel: Leaving this checked will ensure dates appear in excel format. Otherwise they will appear as a normal text format.
• Automatically format cells for Excel 2007+: If this setting is not selected, your export will be in Excel’s general format. If you enable this setting, Excel will format dates, integers, decimals, Boolean values (True/False) and currencies.
• Create a Daily Saved Export: By checking this box, the saved export will be pre-processed once every 24 hours and available for immediate download on the main Form Exports page. After 35 days without downloading the export will stop updating, but you can press the "Update Data" button to resume daily updates. 
  
• Include duplicates and other unprocessed forms: If every variable collected by the mobile user is the same, CommCare flags these submissions as a "duplicate." This can happen when there is more connectivity, so CommCare mobile submits a form multiple times before it receives confirmation that a form has reached the server. By checking this box, there will be duplicate form submissions in the export download.
• Expand Multiple Choice Questions: if you have checkbox questions in your app this setting will create one column for every possible answer. 

Form Settings

• In the first column, the field (data point) can be re-ordered by dragging the box  up or down. The order that is selected on this page will correspond with the order the variables are displayed in the export file. You can also select the fields you want to include in your report by using the check boxes. 
• In the second column, the fields shown represent the data collected by the mobile user, the application, the phone, and the server where the data is stored. 
  • Show Deleted Questions and Advanced Questions: If selected, the export will allow you to see advanced questions and/or questions that have been deleted from the current version of your application. Advanced questions include metadata like case updates and server information.
• In the third column, change field names which will update the title row of the data export. By default the display column will repeat the field name from the second column which are referred to as question ids.
  
  
  
  

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Any form with associated multimedia files will have a Download button accessible. When you download the multimedia, it will appear as a zip file onto your computer, each photo will be a unique JPEG. These media files will be named in the format question ID-username-form id

Example: [casename]-[question_id]-[username]-[form_id].jpg

Example: johnm-head_of_household-supervisor5-e9b4cdfa-c6a2-8607-b4e8-9839493ca2de.jpg

To identify which form submission a multimedia file came from, use the form_id (in green above). Each form submission has a unique form_id.

E. Common Questions Regarding Data Exports

What is the difference between "---" and blank values in form exports?

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If you see "---" in a form, this means that a question was never presented to the end user. For example, if you have a question that had a display condition that was not met and therefore the question was hidden completely from the mobile worker, including that field in a form export will show "---" as the value, i.e. questions skipped logically/automatically by the app show up in exports as "---" 

This also happens when the mobile user is not using the latest version of an application in which question ids or the application structure have been changed, hence the user never sees the latest questions and the data appears as "—". For more information, see Making Changes to a Deployed Application. 

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Error Messages In Exports

Multimedia Exports

You may notice this error message when trying to export multimedia:

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 This indicates that the file size is too large, and you should reattempt downloading the multimedia export by changing your filters to reduce the file size. Due to limited system resources, we are able to support multimedia exports only up to 5 GB in size.

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This export contains 101865 rows. Please change the filters to be less than 100000 rows.

This means that the number of rows exceeds what we're able to successfully support via the export UI. You can try to reduce the date range of the export and download in batches, or you can also add filters to reduce the number of users the export is covering.

Alternatively, you can use other methods we have available to export your Form Data in case you have a large data set. Please see this help page for more information on selecting tools for data exports on CommCare HQ.