As part of the recent API updates, it’s worth highlighting an important change that may affect some projects.
If your existing submissions previously included fields such as _submission_notes, _notes, please be aware that these fields will no longer be available.
If your workflows relied on these fields, we recommend reviewing your projects to ensure that those question fields are being ignores from your scripts or data extraction queries.
My Power Query was working normally until last week, but I have recently started encountering an error when refreshing the queries. The issue is occurring across all of my projects, rather than being limited to a specific project or Kobo form.
I have not made any changes or updates to the Kobo forms, their structure, or the data collection setup. However, the Power Query is now displaying an error during the refresh process for all projects.
Could you please help me identify the cause of the error and advise on how it can be resolved? Attached is the screenshots of the error message.
I think the screenshots give a better clue. The error is saying that _submission_notes and _notes columns can’t be found. Since you’re getting this across all your projects, it looks like one of the columns your Power Query is expecting is no longer being returned by Kobo.
I’d check the query steps first, especially the step where those columns are being selected or transformed. If you click through the Applied Steps, you should be able to see which step throws the error. You may need to update that step so it no longer expects those columns, depending on how your query is set up.
Since this started recently without you changing the forms, I’d also mention these exact missing column names when reporting it to Kobo support. That should give them something concrete to investigate.
@amritshakya
Welcome to the forum!
Could you please share how you are currently retrieving your data from KoboToolbox?
If you haven’t explored this yet, please take a look at the following documentation article:
Also, if you are connecting your data using a downloaded Excel file, I strongly recommend checking the selected fields in your export configuration.
Thank you very much @Joe_Mark for getting back to me. I tried your suggestion and edited the query steps, and I’m now able to get the latest data.
Just out of curiosity, did Kobo Table add the “submission note” and “notes” columns, or were they added accidentally? I checked my old data and the log data, and, to my surprise, I noticed that both columns were added to the latest export.
@jorcabrera Thank you for the response.
I’ve used Power Query to retrieve the data directly from the Kobo server.
Hi @tanzilhuda
It looks like you a hitting the save button.
Please try with Refresh All button one under the Data tab
@amritshakya @tanzilhuda
Since these fields have been removed, the main thing to keep in mind is that they are no longer available.
If your workflows relied on them, we recommend reviewing your projects and updating any scripts or data‑extraction queries to ensure those fields are safely ignored going forward.
Thanks a lot. It was a glitch of Microsoft Office 2019. It’s perfectly working now.
Thanks for the heads up. For projects that used submission notes, is there a way to export the existing notes before they’re removed, or have they already been dropped from older data? It would also help to know if there’s a replacement field for adding notes going forward.
