Hey @DougBrowning
Thank you for your suggestions. When i shortened the field name that is referenced in the choices worksheet, i was able to republish the survey without that error.
That approach seems much more simple that expanding the field size in the feature service. we've got many years of data in the service and i don't want to recreate/republish all of that.
It seems like maybe the Esri team chould rethink either how the search() functionality is setup/configured within the xls form or reconsider the form validation process when search() is being used. It's reasonable that the length of a field name could be longer than the values going into the field. Or maybe its just me 😉