Exclude note columns from exported file

User Support Data Management
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Thanks for this excellent software resource!

I have a rather complicated form created with xls form that includes a number of type = “note” columns for visual headers. When I export/download data from my form submissions, these columns appear in my spreadsheets as completely blank columns (it makes sense that they are blank because users cannot enter data for notes). There are a non-trivial number of these, so I would prefer not to delete them manually post-hoc.

I would like to exclude these columns when downloading data. I am able to do this for group headers with the existing tool in KoboToolbox, but no such option exists for note columns. Perhaps there is a way to specify the xlsform itself so that nothing will be generated for notes? I tried leaving “name” blank for these, but that did not work.

How might I go about excluding these columns from my final spreadsheets? Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

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Hi @tkraft
Welcome to the community. What you are looking for has been discussed previously in the following discussions which can be found here.

Stephane

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Hi Stephane,

Thank you for pointing me to this. That solution would definitely achieve the desired goal, but having to redeploy each time I want to download data probably isn’t worth it. Another workaround I can think of is to just name the note columns with a recognizable prefix that I can filter out in any downstream programming.

I will keep an eye out on the forum to see if in the future there are ways to specify whether a column is included in exported files. Thanks again for the help!

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Hi @tkraft
Your off system workaround is definitely a good one. I normally write my scripts that is for the data I am working on and run this scripts every-time I download the data .

All the best.

Stephane

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