# Exporting survey data

**URL:** <https://forum.surveyengine.com/t/exporting-survey-data/392>\
**Category:** Support\
**Created:** [19 March 2026 09:13 UTC](https://forum.surveyengine.com/t/exporting-survey-data/392 "2026-03-19T09:13:23Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![healthgov.asmph](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b5a626/32.png) [@healthgov.asmph](https://forum.surveyengine.com/u/healthgov.asmph)\
**Post date:** [19 March 2026 09:13 UTC](https://forum.surveyengine.com/t/exporting-survey-data/392/1 "2026-03-19T09:13:23Z")

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Hello!

I see that I can export covariates, my opt out experiment, and my forced experiment in separate files. I want to export my survey data in just one file. Is that possible to do?

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**Author:** ![benno](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex017/user_avatar/forum.surveyengine.com/benno/32/3_2.png) [@benno](https://forum.surveyengine.com/u/benno)\
**Post date:** [23 March 2026 11:35 UTC](https://forum.surveyengine.com/t/exporting-survey-data/392/2 "2026-03-23T11:35:47Z")

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SurveyEngine exports the choice data and covariate data separately to avoid an explosion of data with an automatic merge.

however joining the data is trivially easy in R - or similar  
if you have 2 datasets (covariates and dce). The R command to merge is.

`merged ← merge(covariates, dce, by = “RID”, all.x = TRUE)`

This does a ‘left join’ which means that all the covariate data rows are retained - even if there are missing DCE rows - which is possible if the respondent abandons the survey before the DCE section.