Steve Dotto here.
Today I want to show you Google’s online form tool, a free from creation tool that’s
included in your Google Drive’s suite of free tools.
Now building online forms or forms that we can email in are a great way for us to gather
data.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s registration information or opinion.
Being able to create a form where people fill in and common fields and that information
flows directly into a spreadsheet or database on your site is a terrific tool for gathering
information and data.
A lot of us pay a monthly fee for different forms creation tools that make it easier for
us to embed forms in our website or send emails with forms embedded.
With Google has a lot of functionality built right in for free and I don’t think a lot
of people take much time to explore this particular feature so let’s have a look at it, shall
we?
In your Google account, go into the Create menu and there beneath Word Processing and
Spreadsheet is the Form tool and it’s actually fairly simple when we go into it.
It doesn’t do an unbelievable number of different things.
It does basic gathering of data for us but it doesn’t simply and of course it does
it for free.
So what you do is you work your way through what you want to collect.
Of course depending on your form, you have a good idea of what sort of data you want
to collect but I’ll give you an idea of the sorts that it works with here.
So I’m going to create a lunch form where we’re going to order hot lunches.
Maybe a school wants to have a hot lunch order form for their special hot lunch days.
Once you create that, you basically put in the title of the form, you can give some instructions
to the form, and then you get into the data gathering area which includes the types of
questions that you want to have and the sort of responses that you’re looking for.
You label each of your questions and then choose what type of question it is.
They start you with kind of two pre-done questions but you can add more as you go.
In this case here, it’s going to be text saying “What’s your name?”
That’s a good start, a good typical starting point for any form and then we work our way
through looking at these different choices for creating the other questions.
Once you’ve established who they are, the next question you might have for them is going
or might be, and if I want to edit it here, there we go.
I can create all the text to edit the question.
I might want a multiple choice one or checkboxes.
Let’s choose checkboxes.
That’s good because people might want to order more than one thing.
Then you put in Pizza in the first one.
In the second one, you put Hotdog.
You see what’s happening is we are building out our data structure as we build the form.
Now I’ve got one pre-cooked here.
Let’s put the lunch metaphor, I guess that’s a good thing.
So that you don’t have to watch me spending all my time entering all this information
so here, let’s go into the lunch order form that I’ve already created and I’ve already
got some data input.
Now this field is of course different than the building view which we were just in.
This is as we start to gather data.
I’ll circle back to this in a few moments and show you how the data ends up in here
but let’s go in.
Let’s take a look at the form itself that I was creating.
Here’s the form that I was creating in the same area.
So it’s got Name, Division in this case, and then I’ve got three different order
forms in case people want to order two or three pizzas or something along that line.
Once you create all of this structure of the form, you’ve decided what data you want
to gather, then you have to determine how you want to share this form with your constituency.
You can email the form to individuals.
You can share it through social networking but you can also email it.
In this case here, I’m going to send this form to myself so you can see what the email
looks like on my side.
So I’ll just send another copy of it out to me.
That email gets sent.
I’ll show you that in a moment.
You can also, if we go here, choose to embed the form.
Now embedding the form means that we get an html code for the form right here that we
can then paste into our web browser.
That's if you’re in WordPress or Drupal, you can go into the html side of your editing
and then you can embed the forms so it becomes a form that’s right in the web page where
people can enter the data and respond while they’re on your website.
So it gives you some nice flexibility as far as that’s concerned.
Let’s take a look at how the form looks as it comes through in our email and how people
then fill in information in the form.
Here’s the lunch order form that I have.
Let me just double click on it and open it up here.
There it is here.
I received an email with a link.
When I click on the link, it brings me into the form itself.
So let’s put ‘Bob’ in and let’s say Bob’s in Division 18 and Bob likes Smokies
and he wants two Smokies.
He puts in that information and then he clicks ‘Submit.’
Now what happens is all of that information is then gathered back in the Forms tool in
our Google Docs account.
Let’s go back into our account here and you see it’s already entered.
What’ll happen is that you’ll go from the File Manager here and I go back into my
lunch form and then I see I’ve got three orders in already.
So there it is: Steve, Julie, and Bob.
I see all of my different orders.
Now the information gets flown into this spreadsheet here so that we can then do all sorts of sorting
and any other sort of data gathering on the form as we see it here.
Now they do have some other tools.
If we go into the Forms tool here, this is a little bit different than the Google Docs
or the Google Drive spreadsheet.
It’s a little different.
We go into the Form tool.
We can see that I can see the summary of all the responses which gives me a nice graphical
representation of all of the different responses.
So I can see my information in a variety of different ways.
Of course I can take this information and I can export it.
I can total it up and see how many things I want.
I can basically structure the data in any way.
This is a really convenient and kind of Spartan way of building forms.
I say Spartan because it’s actually a little bit less Spartan than one might think.
If I go back into the form here and take a look at the structure, if I go back in and
edit the form, there it is, if you look here at the top, I also have the ability to go
with themes.
I can choose different pre-done themes that will make it look a little fancier.
It will dress up the form a little bit.
There’s 97 different ways that they can look.
Let’s choose a Math one.
I thought that looks kind of interesting.
There we go.
Now my lunch order form is going to look like this when it is sent out if I apply that and
I email the form once again to myself.
I go back into my email and get the new form.
Now when we go to the form itself online, it will look like this.
So beautiful!
It just makes me want to fill it out.
Doesn’t it make you want to fill it out?
Google Drive has so much functionality built into it that it’s really worth spending
a little bit of extra time in exploring.
A tool like the Forms tool might not serve all of your needs.
It’s not incredibly sophisticated but it does open your eyes to what you can do as
far as gathering data and for simple data gathering operations, it might be just the
ticket.
I’m Steve Dotto.
I hope you found this useful today.
[END OF AUDIO]
Steve Dotto0Google Drive Forms Tools0September 18, 2012