Never Collate Emails Again -or- I Love Google Forms

My presentation at the Brighton Library Teach Meet (#btnlibtm) was on how to quickly gather feedback using Google Forms. As I kind of rushed through it (there was only 5 minutes) I thought I'd blog it for anyone who'd like a reminder at a slower pace...

Log into your Google Docs account (it's free and if you've got GoogleMail then just click on the 'Documents' link at the top) and click on 'Create new' -> Form

This is what a blank form looks like - ready for you to add a title, description and your first question.

Here we go, first question 'Your name' and you'll see I've ticked the box to make it 'required' ie they have to complete it to submit the form.

Now we're going to add a multiple choice question, but note there are seven different question types to choose from. After adding question you can drag them to re-order, edit them, delete them until you're happy

Here's our form ready to launch - note at the bottom there is the URL to the 'live form' - thats the link you want to email or tweet to your audience.

This is what the live form looks like (you can see a real one here). 

Now the magic happens. By creating a form, Google Docs automatically created an accompanying spreadsheet. As your audience complete the form, their responses are automatically logged under the question headings.

Here are the results from the live demo I did tonight - very impressive watching the responses appear on screen.

And once the results are in you can click on 'show summary of responses' to get an at-a-glance overview of responses.

So, if you are ever thinking of sending an email and then collating the responses into a spreadsheet - then stop! The small effort involved in setting up the form is instantly rewarded by the fact you have nothing to collate - your spreadsheet os ready for you to sort, annotate and do with as you will.

This is just the basic stuff - you can create quite complex, branched surveys using this tool. All free, and unlimited responses allowed.

A word of warning, I wouldn't recommend using this for secure or personal data - Google doesn't comply with UK Data Protection regulations at this time.