Exporting responses
Get your responses out as CSV, PDF, or HTML.
CSV
The response set of a form exports to CSV, one row per response, one column per question. This is the format to use for a spreadsheet, a BI tool, or anything you want to analyse yourself.
What the file looks like:
- The first column is Submitted at, the date and time the response arrived.
- The remaining columns are the question titles, in the form’s own question order: not internal field names, and not the order the answers happen to be stored in.
- A question you have since deleted still has its answers exported, in a column appended after the current ones, so nothing is silently dropped.
- A question somebody left blank produces an empty cell rather than shifting the row’s later columns.
- The file is written with a UTF-8 byte-order mark, so accented characters open correctly in Excel and LibreOffice.
- An answer that begins with
=,+,-or@is escaped, so a respondent cannot hand your spreadsheet a formula to run.
The download is served through a signed URL that is valid for five minutes, so the link cannot be forwarded and used indefinitely. Generate a fresh one from the responses view if it lapses.
An individual response can be rendered as a PDF, questions and answers laid out as a document. This is also the format the Google Drive integration files each response in.
The responses view can print the whole set: a browser print of every response laid out one after another, which is the quickest way to get a paper or PDF copy of everything without going through a spreadsheet.
HTML
The form (not the responses) can be exported as a self-contained HTML file you host yourself. See Sharing & embedding.
Uploaded files
Files respondents attached are not embedded in the export. They are referenced by signed download links. The signature is what authorises the read, and a deployment can give those links a lifetime after which they stop working. If you need the files themselves long-term, download them while the links work. The Google Drive integration does not help here: it files a PDF of the response, and that PDF links to the attachments rather than carrying them.
Deleting responses
Individual responses can be deleted from the responses list, and the whole set can be cleared at once. Deleting a form deletes its responses and their uploaded files, in the database and on disk.