ODK submissions appending to last column of previous submission in google sheets

I've been using ODK collect with google sheets for a few years now. Every once in a while, I see that new submissions start to append with the first column aligned with the last column of the previous submission. For example, if username is in Column A and data-meta-instanceID is in the last column (say column Z), new submissions will be added with the username under column Z.

If this goes unnoticed, the sheet gets jammed up because hundreds of new columns are added.

I can't figure out why this happens and I've never been able to fix it. If you clean everything up, the submissions will start appending correctly again, but after say 30 or 50 submissions, it will start to appending in this bizarre way again.

Hi @madou_h
welcome to the forum! Please introduce yourself here!

I have a few question that will help us to track down the issue:

  1. What ODK Colect version do you use?
  2. Do you notice that behavior only on one specific form or maybe you tried multiple and it's the same?
  3. Could you attach the form you use?
  1. We have 200 field agents using ODK Collect on their personal phones. Some phones are using older version of Android (not sure if this affects which version of ODK collect you are able to use?). All the agents downloaded ODK collect from the play store within the past 3 weeks. On my phone (Samsung S9), I see v1.28.3. I could do a quick survey on the version field agents see if you think that would be useful?
  2. I've been doing surveys with ODK for many years. The behavior only happens once in a while. My hypothesis is it happens you start editing the raw data in directly in the google sheets (e.g. the field agent spelled a school name incorrectly, so you edit it directly in the sheet where the forms are being submitted)... but I have edited raw data before and this behavior doesn't happen.

here is link to the survey: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g9eg-pFNNCx8E63T59-XS0OxkoyVaEuZ/view?usp=sharing

If you are sure they downloaded ODK Collect from the play store within the past 3 weeks that means they have one of the newest versions so that's fine the behavior shouldn't differ.

here is link to the survey: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g9eg-pFNNCx8E63T59-XS0OxkoyVaEuZ/view?usp=sharing 1

I requested permission because i can't access it.