Delete several questions

Hi there,

I have a problem. I was finishing to build my form and I don’t what occurred but a lot of new questions just appeared. I want to delete them but I don’t know how to delete several questions at the same time or even delete an entire group.

Help please
Marie

There are typically over 500 questions to delete :sweat:

Hi Marie
How were you developing your form? If using form builder, I would like to know exactly how the several questions came by. Do you share your share the form or password to the form with other users?

If you did not build this form on the form builder, then your solution would be straightforward.

Solution for both:

  1. Download your form in XLS
  2. On the survey sheet select all rows containing the extra sheets and then delete them.
  3. Save your XLS
  4. Upload the form as a replacement form in your project.

Regards,
Stephane

1 Like

Hi Stephan,

Thank you very much for your answer it may save my life :innocent:

Yes I am building it with the building tool in kobotoolbox.org

Their appearance is a real mystery… I am alone building this form, I didn’t share anything! But what a can tell you is that the new questions are basically old questions repeated. So basically I have now a triplicate questionnaire and the three of them are identical.

Tomorrow I will try what you proposed me.

Marie

1 Like

This is rather weird, can you try the approach I provided and tell me if this is repeated.

Stephane

1 Like

@mariegillot, we would be really interested to have the following information (through a private message) so that we could have a closer look at your case:

  • Username
  • Project name
  • Server

Yes of course, send me one !

So I could finally delete all the questions that were unecessary on the excel format and reupload as a new form but now I have an error message.

It’s always easy to validate your xlsform through this online validator first before uploading them to your user account. It should be able to identify you with syntax issues if there is any.

Ok yes I tried it but I can’t understand very well, it has something to do with the repeating questions I had but I can’t really figure out what it is…

If you want to have the informations about my project please send me a private message

@mariegillot, I have already send you a private message.

I am so sorry I feel stupid but I can’t find your private message :confused:

Well no worries! This post discussed previously should help you send me a private message:

@mariegillot, I received your private message. So summing up your issue:

  • You built your survey project thorough the form builder UI
  • You were about to finish the form building when all of a sudden some unwanted questions appeared in your survey project
  • So you wish to delete them
  • There are approximately 500 questions that appeared suddenly

Did I get them correctly? Correct me if I missed any or wrongly interpreted any.

You did well but I didn’t tell all th

To be more precise, the repeated questions are not random questions they are in fact all the questions already composing my initial survey and as a conséquence it is creating an entire repeated new survey but the repetitions does not appeared only once or twice but three time.

The initial survey has an average of 600 questions and now I have more than 1800 questions.

The weird think is also that the “new questionnaires” appeared into a group of the original questionnaire.

Thank you very much for your help

*the weirdness of this problem yet

So initially you had approximately 600 questions and you now have approximately 1800 questions where the additional 1200 questions are the repeat of the 600 questions.

Yes exactly

When you delete the questions, does this problem recurr?

@mariegillot, when looking at your survey project, I could see only 680 questions:

I don’t see 1800 questions as you say.