Standard exporter does not work for our survey but legacy exporter does | XM Community
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Standard exporter does not work for our survey but legacy exporter does

  • 15 October 2020
  • 8 replies
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We have a survey we deploy every six months. We download the survey data as a csv to do our analysis using statistical software. The download currently works with the legacy exporter, but does not work with the standard exporter. Customer support indicated that the reason is that our survey is “too long.” I find this surprising. There are approximately 58,000 columns in the exported file due to the looping structure of the survey (with fewer than 20 questions), and the final file size is less than 30 MB, which does not seem unreasonable for a csv file.
Customer support tried to download the data using the standard exporter and wasn't able to do it (only the metadata is exported). They suggest reformatting our survey but the solutions they suggest either won’t work for us (if we allow write-in answers and pipe those forward instead of using the dropdown selections that our loops are based on, we’ll have to spend a significant amount of time cleaning and re-categorizing those write-in answers) or do not seem ideal (splitting the survey into 2 or more instances and linking those). It also doesn’t seem that we should have to dedicate time and resources to revamp a survey that is working for us using the legacy exporter.
With the legacy exporter scheduled to be deprecated in 2021, I'm concerned we won't be able to download our data in the future. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get the standard exporter to function similarly to the legacy exporter? Or any ideas why legacy works but the standard does not?
Thanks in advance for your help!

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Best answer by TomG 15 October 2020, 18:01

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8 replies

TomG
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I've run into this before. Other than reducing the number of data fields recorded by the survey, there is nothing you can do about it.
This is something Qualtrics needs to fix before deprecating the legacy exporter. Make your concerns known to Qualtrics Support, your Qualtrics Client Success Manager, etc. and make sure there is an open support case to address the issue.

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TomG Thanks for your answer! I actually posted here after contacting Support and our Client Success Manager. The CSM suggested I post the issue to the Community as a way of logging the issue as something that needs to be addressed.
Hopefully Qualtrics engineers get the word and are able to fix the standard exporter. Or allow users to continue using the legacy exporter indefinitely, as it still meets a need for at least some of us.

TomG
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https://www.qualtrics.com/community/discussion/comment/31159#Comment_31159You should probably post it in the New Product Features section. That's where I've been told to post things like this previously.

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OK thanks. Will do.

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PEO team is having a problem similar to this.
We run an experimental research survey, with 3 conditions randomly presented to participants. We need to extract all questions from a survey, in order to know which condition was presented, and we are not able to.
This is unaceptable. If Qualtrics does not want us to download databases with a big size, they should at least allow us to select which questions we would like to export. We could then merge everything.
It is not acceptable that Qualtrics suppressed the legacy exporter without thinking about this issue.
Can you please consider this request?

TomG
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https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/comment/40695#Comment_40695It's not a great solution, but there is a way to download specific fields. In Data & Analysis select the fields you want to download. Then when you export uncheck "Download all fields" and it will only download the currently selected fields.

P
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Dear @TomG, thank you very much for your suggestion.
It would be great if it worked. However, the list of the questions/variables we may select to download does not include the questions that to not require an answer. So, we still cannot know to which condition were participants allocated.
Thank you even though!

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@PEO sorry to hear you're having this issue.
The new exporter tool started working for us in January 2021, so we've been able to export our data without the legacy exporter. So I'm not sure what happened behind the scenes, but it's working for our use case. We don't have randomized questions, so not sure it's helpful for your situation.
I notice on the exporter tool, under More Options, there is an option to "Export viewing order data for randomized surveys." Does that help you? Otherwise, I contacted customer support and our Qualtrics Client Success Manager and they were able to forward my issue to the right people. So you might try that too, if you haven't already.

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