My forms won't upload to Google Drive: "max number of columns is 255"

Support
1

Hello.

I am using ODK Collect and XLSForms to conduct a survey. I have successfully created and uploaded several forms so far, but have been facing a trouble with a specific forms. I am using Google Drive and Google Sheets to store the data (have been working great so far until now). When I send the forms, I get the following error:

"max number of columns is 255 - yours have 265. Unable to upload spreadsheet"

I can't figure out what is wrong, since this specific forms is no different from many others I have uploaded without problem so far. I also can't understand why would the number of columns be a problem, since the max number of columns for Google Sheets is over a thousand. My forms have 71 rows in the choices sheet. I have successfully uploaded a forms which had more than 300 rows in the choices sheet.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

2

@anon74210382 Can you attach the form you are using?

3

I am sorry. Here it is.

forms.xlsx (44.9 KB)

4

By my count, this form would generate 265 columns in the Google Sheet. Columns in the sheet map to the number of rows in the name column of the XLSForm survey sheet (we don't count begin/end group/repeat). Your other forms likely had less than 255 columns. The number of choices have nothing to do with it.

Google Sheets used to have a 255 column limit which Google has recently changed to a 5 million cell limit. Collect has not yet been updated to reflect that. I've filed an issue at https://github.com/opendatakit/collect/issues/2888. Code contributions are welcome.

5

I understand now. I thought this limitation would be because of the number of choices.

I also didn't know about Google Sheet's limitation, so the problem made even less sense to me.

Thank you very much.

6

This has been fixed in ODK Collect v1.20 Beta. Can you try it to confirm?