Six things you might not have known about Google Forms

Google are improving their cloud-based Drive tools all the time, so unless you really stay on top of the changes it’s easy to completely miss newly added features.

Here are six neat things you can now do with Google Forms that you may not have known about.

You can include images and videos in your form

It’s useful to be able to show a picture or video to your users so you can ask them a question about it. This was a feature that many users had been requesting for a while, and you now can do it. Just choose Image or Video when you create a new question and add your media. Simples!

You can paste a list of items into a form question

When you create a Multiple Choice, Tickboxes or Choose from a List question type, you need to provide a list of options. But did you know that you can just copy the text from any list and paste it into item 1 and then each line in the list becomes a new item. That should speed things up a bit!

You can validate the text that goes into a form field

When users fill out your form, it’s safe to assume they will do it wrong. You can try to guard against silly errors by validating text or number responses, or making sure that certain conditions are met. Text fields can be tested to make sure they contain certain words or phrases, or are valid email addresses or URLs. Numbers can be checked to see that they are within certain ranges or are certain types of numbers. You can even check for maximum or minimum character counts in paragraph fields, or that the correct number of items are selected in a Tickbox question type. End result? Less stupid answers!



You can produce a print friendly version of your form

Google Forms are so quick and easy to deliver online, but what if some of your users need to fill out your form on paper? Easy. When you print a Google Form it automatically reformats for print, and even gives you the little bubbles to colour in for multiple choice and grid questions.

You can change the response destination of your form

In the old version of Forms, a form was automatically associated with a spreadsheet, and that was it. In the new version of forms, you can choose the destination for your responses.  This means that you can choose to send your responses to a sheet, or to keep them embedded in a form. Even better, you can change the response destination at any time. So if you send responses to a spreadsheet and then want to use the same questions with a different group later, you can just reuse the form but switch to a new response destination. End result? This gives you lots of flexibility!

You can get notified when your form is filled out

It’s good to be notified when someone completes your form. If your responses are being sent to a spreadsheet, you can do this easily by choosing Notification Rules from the Tools menu and selecting the settings that suit you best.