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Overview
With Google Forms, you can create and analyze surveys right in your mobile or web browser—no special software required. You get instant results as they come in. And, you can summarize survey results at a glance with charts and graphs. You can use Google forms to manage event registrations, create a quick opinion poll, and much more. F&M also provides Qualtrics, which has advanced capabilities for creating surveys. You may want to consider using it. A helpful Comparison Chart is available to help you decide which application will best meet your needs.
Jump to a topic in this knowledge article
- Distributing a Form
- Analyzing Responses
- Google Training Links
How to Create a Form
You can use or modify an existing form template, or create your own form from scratch. To start, visit forms.google.com and select a template or start with a blank form. Give your form a name and if desired, add a description or select a different theme. You can also start a form by selecting the “New” (plus sign) icon in Google Drive, or by selecting the Forms app from the Google apps icon found in the top right corner of many of the Google apps.
Adding Questions
If you selected a template, you can drag questions to reorder them, or delete questions you don’t want to use. If you started from a blank form, you’ll want to click the “Untitled Question” area to enter each question. You can change the question type by clicking the down arrow to the right. Available question types are:
- Multiple Choice or Multiple Choice grid
- Check Boxes or Checkbox grid
- Dropdown Selections
- Short Answer text box
- Long Answer paragraph box
- Linear Scale
- Date and Time
- File Upload (Only available when the form is stored in your personal My Drive space. File attachments are not allowed when a form is stored in a Shared Drive).
You can also specify if people must answer a question by clicking “required” and you can add images, files, or video content to your questions!
Adding Sections 
Consider grouping your questions into sections to make it easier to manage your survey, provide for conditional responses, or easily duplicate several questions to another survey. Conditional responses allow you to send a person to another question or group of questions based on an answer they give.
Click the section icon to the right of the question block to add a section.
Form Settings 
The settings option near the top center of the screen provides several options that give you flexibility on how your survey will operate. In the form settings, you can decide if you want to automatically collect a person’s email address, send them a receipt of their responses, allow the form to be completed by people outside of F&M, prevent them from completing the survey more than once, or letting them come back to change their response.
You can also decide if you want everyone to see everyone else’s answers, or if you want to invite other people to help you with writing your survey.
If your collaborators wish to see the results as they come in, they will have to open the Google Sheet that collects the responses and sign up for notifications by selecting Tools from the menu along the top of the sheet.
Previewing a Form
You can preview your form by clicking the icon that looks like an eye.
If you wish to make any changes, select the pencil icon. (note: AR could not locate this icon, does it still exist? or does it only show up once form is published?)
Distributing a Form
You can send Google Forms by email, by a link in a chat or email message, embed it on a website, or share a link on social media. Once the form is published, at the top right, click Send. Respondents do not need to have a Google account to complete a survey unless you are restricting the survey to be completed only by people at F&M, restricting respondents to only complete the survey once, or asking them to upload a file.
If you want to collect email addresses, choose an appropriate option:
- If the form’s audience is limited to F&M (the default audience), check “Automatically collect respondent's Franklin & Marshall College email address”.
- If you’re distributing the form externally, check “Collect email addresses.”
Choose how you want to send the form. Remember to change the audience setting if you are distributing your survey to people outside of F&M.
- Email—Click the Email icon. Enter email addresses in the To field. You can customize the subject and message contents.
- Link—Click the Link icon. You can shorten the URL. Click Copy and paste the link into a chat, conversation, or email.
- Website content—Click Embed < >. You can specify inline frame dimensions. Click Copy and paste the HTML into your website or blog.
- Social media—Click one of the social media icons.
Printing a Form
To print a form and/or the responses;
1. Go to the content you want to print.
- If you're printing questions or individual responses, at the top of the form, click the More icon and then Print.
- If you're printing a summary of responses, from your browser, click File and then Print.
2. Choose your settings and then click Print.
Analyzing Responses
Once you send out your form, you will notice a numeric value next to the Responses option located near the top of your form, indicating how many responses have been submitted. Click in that area to view the responses, which can be viewed in several different ways:
- Summary View: This option will show you an overview of how everyone answered the questions. It will include charts to represent much of the data.
- Question View: This option will let you look at each question to see how it was answered by your respondents.
- Individual View: This option will overlay the form with the person’s responses. You will be able to easily see how they answered each question. This view option is a favorite of many users!
- Spreadsheet View: Since all responses are automatically sent to a Google Sheet, you can click the spreadsheet icon to view the results as a spreadsheet.
- As a .CSV File: Responses can also be exported to a .CSV (Comma-Separated Values) file for use in Excel or other applications.
Google Training Links
What can you do with Forms? - Google Workspace Learning Center
Forms Cheat Sheet