Report edits not saving

I know this sounds strange, but every time I have one of these weird things I clear my cache/cookies and 90% of the time it fixes the problem… Let me know if this helps and if not we can dig a little deeper into it.

Thanks so much for replying, kgillis. I contacted Qualtrics Support who attributed it to an intermittent bug -- maybe localized to my machine or connection. Though, I’ll offer that colleagues have experienced this hiccup too. I did refresh and clear my cache as a strategy (among others) but to no avail. Reports are fiddly and glitchy, so I’m chalking it up to that :)

Could you maybe build in a dashboard and then create an export automation from there (making the assumption that you’re exporting the report)?

Romanop --

Thank you so much for writing. In addition to your report, I’ve now heard from colleagues at 12 different agencies and institutions who are experiencing the same difficulties we’ve encountered.

Your report—and those of others—make it clear that this is not an isolated or local issue. While my interactions with the technical team (indirectly, via a very helpful consultant) have been appreciated, it appears that Qualtrics continues to treat this as a customer-specific problem rather than acknowledging it as a platform-level bug.

The time lost and the unreliability of the platform are undeniably frustrating, as is Qualtrics’ response to these concerns.

Appreciate you taking time to write!

Chipper

Hi ​@Chipper & ​@romanop,

Apologies for the frustration this has caused. I shared your concerns internally, here’s some reasons for the issue and tips that could help prevent it down the line:

• Our support team has noticed that this issue arises when there are multiple users editing the same report or dashboard.
• A tip they offered is to perhaps let the changes "reindex" and save rather than making a change then immediately logging out, as this could also cause it. 
• Additionally, we could submit a product feature idea to create a manual save button on reports and dashboard rather than it being automatic.

Hi ​@Chipper & ​@AlonsoC,

Thank you both for your input.

Chipper, as you already mentioned, this does not appear to be an isolated issue. We also didn’t raise it earlier because the problem is difficult to reproduce, sometimes everything works fine, and sometimes it doesn’t. The real concern is the amount of time lost when it fails, which has already cost us countless hours. The platform is starting to feel unreliable, and our trust is slowly diminishing. That’s why we’ll be reaching out to Support and our account manager to push for a resolution. Perhaps AlonsoC can also assist us here.

AlonsoC, thank you for sharing our concerns internally, we really appreciate that. To address your points:

• In about 98% of cases, only one person is editing a CX dashboard at a time.

• We never log out immediately after making a change; instead, we typically switch from one dashboard page to another within the same DB. I’ve also noticed (though this is still speculation) that waiting a few seconds for all widgets to fully load, or after making a change, before moving on sometimes seems to help.

• Ultimately, introducing a manual save button would likely resolve everything. If we could explicitly save changes right after making them, we’d have the assurance that our edits won’t be lost.

The issue of changes not being saved first appeared about a year and a half ago, specifically within the filter bar of the CX Dashboard. For example, when we added a filter or updated its title, then navigated to the next page, the changes would simply disappear.

Over the past few months, the DBs became increasingly unstable. Newly added widgets vanish, and edits appear to be saved, yet as soon as you move to another page, return, or refresh the account, all those changes revert back again.

Thank you, AlonsoC, for sharing strategies with us, and thank you, romanop, for taking up the mantle. The loss of work and time has been especially painful—both generally and under tight timelines.

I’m not an expert in software systems, so I can’t speak to the efficacy of a “save” button. That said, I would guess that removing the autosave feature might not be ideal for many Qualtrics users. One possible solution could be to offer both automatic and manual save options, allowing users to “push” or force a save when needed. Of course, if the underlying bug prevents saved work from being retained, even a manual save may not resolve the issue—so identifying and addressing that root cause remains important.

Greetings, ​@kgillis,

Please excuse my delayed response and thank you for staying “plugged in” to this issue and offering an additional suggestion.

Sincerely,

Chipper

​@Chipper ​@AlonsoC,

I fully agree with your assessment regarding the save button, Chipper. It should serve as an addition to the existing auto-save functionality and act as an extra failsafe to ensure that all edits are properly saved.

If there is an underlying technical issue causing the system to believe that work has been saved whether through auto-save or manual save, while in reality the edits are not stored, then an alternative solution should be proposed.

Of course, the best outcome would be for the auto-save functionality itself to work as intended.

I also recently had issues with this on Friday while working on a survey and had to go back and re-do the work.  I thought initially it was due to our SSO, but I’m glad I stumbled on this discussion. 

Oh, ​@pamelalbeck, I feel the pain of that. Thanks for joining the conversation! 

​@pamelalbeck I had the same issue arise since last week. It stated that the edits were saved, but when I wanted to press the Publish button it seemed to not Publish anymore and the button malfunctioned. When I went out of the survey and back into it again, it seemed that work was lost.

I did not work in a survey this week, so hopefully I won't run into this issue again when I do.

​@romanop My survey was not letting me add display logic to a question and when I refreshed the account it hadn’t saved the last couple of hours of my work, so it sounds like a similar issue.

I also haven’t been working in any surveys this week, but agree I’m hopeful it won’t repeat and will need to monitor.

We are also facing the same issue when working on dashboards. 

When you start editing multiple pages within a dashboard, it becomes harder to track what’s been changed and whether those changes were actually saved across all pages.

That’s why having a manual “save” option would be super helpful—just to make sure everything is properly saved!

Hi everyone,

Since I've seen this issue is impacting many of you, I've escalated it to the product team. They're now aware of your feedback and comments, and I'll keep you posted here as soon as I hear back from them.

I'm also going to submit the product idea that was shared in this thread. Just a heads up—there's currently a bit of a delay with ideas being processed this month, but I'll share the product ID once it's live so you can upvote it.

Thanks very much for escalating, @AlonsoC, and to @romanop, @pamelalbeck, and @ESGOMEZES for responding and reporting in this thread.

Hi ​@AlonsoC any news on the product ID? I'd love to vote on it.