Data comes wrapped in excel formula

**What is the problem?
this is a very interesting and odd problem, data in my excel spreadsheet comes like a formula, we are collecting data from several devices, several devices started doing this tricky several days ago and I can't find anything like that on the internet, please see attached screenshot

Also, along with this weird thing, start, end and today date format is changed from the same devices,

Anyone seen something like that?

**What ODK tool and version are you using? i have the latest version of ODK collect on phones and excel spreadsheet

What steps can we take to reproduce the problem? - basically, i don't know, this happened to several devices but not with all, i cant reproduce this problem on other devices,

What you have you tried to fix the problem? - I tried to reset the phone to factory settings, reinstall ODK collect, reconnect to google account from scratch, nothing helped

Anything else we should know or have? If you have a test form or screenshots or logs, attach here.

Hi @nodari

as I understand a few different devices have sent data to that sheet?

In version v1.14.0 we added support for repeat groups in Google Sheets and also improved a content visible in columns that represent media files. I mean before 1.14.0 it was just a url in such a column but now it's a hyperlink - so you see a file name and you can click on it and open the file.

I'm pretty sure your devices use different versions of our app and that's why the behavior is a little bit different but it works in the same way you can still open such files.

Is it a problem for you or you were just curious?

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Hello @Grzesiek2010

That's it, That's it !!!
You cant imagine how happy I'm not, I did not check if other phones were left on the older versions, once i updated one of them to latest version data sent from the latest version of the app delivered in the same fashion, in hyperlink formula,
@Grzesiek2010 is there any option to prevent this? maybe there is something to do in xls form? that's a great feature when users can see links directly to their images but all my system is built on the raw link (I'm turning them to the images in the sheet cell)

Also, what happened with the date formatting and the start and end date? they are changed and not only formatting is changed

@Grzesiek2010 thank you so much, you cant imagine how happy in today, yes, of course, this was a real problem for me, thank you man :slight_smile:

you can use this script I wrote for one user There's a way to import photos on Google sheet, in such a way that i have the link to the photo (with. jpg)? - #4 by Grzesiek2010 it just extracts all links in your sheet, but be careful I didn't test it much so I would recommend making a copy of your sheet just in case.

Also, what happened with the date formatting and the start and end date? they are changed and not only formatting is changed

I have no idea I'll investigate it.

Thank you once again @Grzesiek2010 :slight_smile:

Im not sure if the script is the solution for us, perhaps i have to dig in formulas to extract link to the image, somehow, i will do this :slight_smile:
regarding dates, at this moment date is not so important, i will convert it with excel function :slight_smile:
Thank you again

@nodari @Grzesiek2010 and I have discussed this a little bit at https://github.com/opendatakit/collect/issues/2221 and are proposing to go back to putting the raw media link in the sheet rather than using the hyperlink function. Does that sound good to you?

@Nicola_Pace you also ran into this recently in There's a way to import photos on Google sheet, in such a way that i have the link to the photo (with. jpg)?. Would going back to including the direct link work for you?

Howdy

@LN, of course, that's better, raw data is always better rather than wrapped it in the formula, at this moment we don't have workarounds and we were forced to downgrade our application to older versions where this problem was not
Thank you guys

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For everyone else who is interesting in this question, problem was solved by the update 1.15 thanks to the dev team, this thread can be closed for discusstion

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