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Exporting form entries to a spreadsheet
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Everything anybody has ever submitted through a form is stored on your site, and you can pull it out as a spreadsheet whenever you like. You choose which form, which questions to include and which dates to cover, and you get a CSV file, which is a spreadsheet that Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets all open without any fuss.
Nothing leaves your site by doing this. Exporting takes a copy. The entries stay exactly where they are, so there is no way to lose anything by exporting too often or by exporting the wrong thing and starting again.
Doing it
- In the left menu, go to Forms, then Import/Export.
- Make sure Export Entries is selected on the left.
- Choose your form from Select a Form. The list of questions appears once you do.
- Tick the fields you want. See the note below on which ones are actually useful.
- Scroll down and set a date range if you want one. Leave it empty to export everything.
- Click Download Export File at the bottom. The file lands in your Downloads folder.
Which fields to tick
Select All is tempting and usually wrong. It adds twenty-odd columns of technical detail that make the spreadsheet harder to read. A good default is every question on the form plus Entry Date, and nothing else.
| Field | Worth including? |
|---|---|
| The form’s own questions | Yes. This is the actual content. |
| Entry Date | Yes, nearly always. Without it you cannot sort by when things arrived. |
| Entry Id | Only if you need to match a row back to the entry on the site. |
| Source Url | Useful when the same form sits on several pages and you want to know which page brought each enquiry. |
| User Agent, User IP, Submission Speed | Rarely. Technical detail, and IP addresses are personal data you probably do not want sitting in a shared spreadsheet. |
| The Payment and Transaction fields | Only if this form takes payments. Otherwise they export as empty columns. |
An export is personal data, so treat the file accordingly. It contains real people’s names, email addresses and phone numbers. Keep it somewhere access-controlled rather than emailing it around, and delete it when you are done with it. If you are on a shared or public computer, remember it is sitting in Downloads.
Opening it without wrecking it
One habit saves a lot of irritation. If you are on Excel and you open the CSV by double-clicking, Excel sometimes mangles things: long phone numbers turn into scientific notation, and numbers with leading zeros lose them.
- Google Sheets: use File then Import, and it handles it correctly.
- Excel: use the Data tab, then From Text/CSV, rather than double-clicking the file. You get a preview where you can set the phone column to Text.
- Numbers on a Mac: double-clicking is fine.
If a column looks wrong, nothing has been damaged. Your entries on the site are untouched. Close the file without saving and import it again.
What to use this for
- Handing a month of enquiries to somebody who does not have a website login.
- Counting things. How many wholesale enquiries came in last quarter, which options people pick most often.
- Getting a list of addresses into your mailing list tool. Do check people actually consented to marketing before you do that.
- Keeping a copy before we make changes to a form, so you have the old answers in their original shape.
When to email us instead
- The download does nothing, or produces an empty file. On a form with a lot of entries this is usually a timeout, and there are ways round it.
- You need this on a schedule rather than by hand. It can be automated to land somewhere every month.
- You need entries from a form that has since been deleted. Often still recoverable, but not from this screen.
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