Is there a way to stop a Google Form from renaming the columns in my sheet?

[jthurston]

Hello,

Many of my tables are connected to Google Sheets that are populated by Google Forms. The questions in the forms contain a translation, and are a bit long for a column name. I am trying to rename the columns in my Sheet to something more simple. However, it looks like the form renames all of those columns to match the Form questions whenever a user submits a response.

For example, I change the column “First name (Primer nombre)” to “First Name”, and then as soon as another user submits the form I’m back to “First name (Primer nombre)” in the sheet. Is there a way to stop this from happening?

[scott_robinson · Accepted solution]

Google forms does indeed change the column names to be the same as the question name.

This is a bit of a pain…

The way I get around this, especially if the questions are long is to simply use the Description option in the Google form to fill out the question text and use a short name for the actual question…Q1, Q1a etc.

This way your column names stay nice and short in the sheet, you can fill the extra details for them in Appsheet field names and you can have huge paragraphs in the description sections of the fields in the Google form that dont change the column names in the sheet.

[jthurston]

Hi Scott,

Thank you for the suggestion. This might work for us. I will give it a shot.