Today, my students and I are getting error messages when we try to use the getColumn function to acces columns of tables we have imported. An example of the error message we are getting:
You tried to get a column called “Country of birth” from a table called “Nobel Prize Winners 1901-2016”, but that column doesn’t exist.
I am getting the same issue. I have tried different browsers. Even the lesson projects are broken when trying to use the getColumn() function.
Unit 6 Lesson 2 section 4 has errors when trying to do getColumn(“Cats”, “Name”)
My students and I are experiencing the same problem, with the following data sets:
Please send help! 
Same exact issue, but the kids are using App lab for their create task. It worked fine yesterday, but not today. Glad it’s not just me, but it needs to be addressed.
I am getting the same issue no column exists whether it is a student made table or an imported one.
I still get the issue of no column exists, but if you put in empty quotes it will get all the items from the table as objects.
Here is some example code that is working to get all the dog names from the data set.
var dogs = getColumn(“Dogs”, “”);
console.log(dogs);
for (var i = 0; i < dogs.length; i++) {
console.log(dogs[i].Name);
}
Until they fix the issue, here are two lines of code that does the same as getColumn(“TableName”, “ColumnName”) that appears to be working.
var allObjects = getColumn(“TableName”, “”);
var column = allObjects.map(function(x) {return x.ColumnName;});
Example using Dog data set:
var dogs = getColumn(“Dogs”, “”);
var dogNames = dogs.map(function(x) {return x.Name;});
I reported this to Code.org this morning and received the following reply:
Thank you for contacting Code.org!
We appreciate you reporting this issue with our datasets in App Lab - and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused! We understand that the timing of this bug is particularly unfortunate during the crucial Create PT season.
Please know that our engineering team is fully committed, working diligently to resolve this issue as swiftly as possible. We anticipate a solution will be implemented in the next few hours. Your patience and understanding in this matter are greatly appreciated!
If you have any additional questions, please let us know.
Problem persists in CA @ 9am on 3/22/24. Students are working on thier CPT. I am having students create mini data sets (lists) to use while writing their programs and debugging until the problem is solved.
I encountered this same error for students who are creating their own data sets…4/26/25. In trying to solve the problem, I went into the table in the Data tab. I clicked the “Visualize Data” button to see if this tool would recognize the table. It did! I was able to make a bar chart. And after this I returned to the code and ran the exact same program that was previously erroring…and this time it ran! It seems that using the 'Visualize Data" tool forces the data to be recognized. Obviously not ideal, but if this continues to work, it’s at least a work around. I will test it out with the rest of my students tomorrow.
Thanks for sharing this quick fix! Sounds like there might be an intermittent error here. Have you sent in a bug report to support@code.org?
After helping students today, we believe the students with the error had data in the “Add” row without having added it to the table, so it appeared to them to be in the table… When we clicked “Visualize Data” either it was clearing those fields or auto-adding the row, I don’t know which because I didn’t pay attention to that part. So I don’t think the error we were experiencing was real, it was just user error, however I do see that many students made the same error, so perhaps the design on this is less intuitive than it could be.