Skip to main content

Moan: Google Refreshes Google Forms

By
Google's announcement that Google Forms have been refreshed was welcome, it's always encouraging when a company updates a core tool you and your colleagues regularly use.... like say, Blogger. For example. Ahem.

Ahem.

Anyway, watching the videos about what had changed I notice that they've added the ability to share editing/viewing forms with people. That's great but it's sort of what I come to expect from Google, that nice Share dialog in many ways IS Google Apps. It doesn't feel like an innovation, it feels like a neglected corner being given a spring clean.

The relationship between Forms and Spreadsheets has been altered. It's never been clear that when you create a Form a Spreadsheet will magically be created for the results and now you can have a Form that doesn't have an associated Spreadsheet. I'm not sure if they've made it clearer, just different. We'll see.

And the demo in the video above, of being able to copy a list of items into a multiple choice question is a feature that I bet there's been at least one request for ( I'm exaggerating of course ). Where did that feature come from except from the developer's own weird fantasies? Or am I being harsh?

Google Forms have has a CSS face lift, it looks like they'll look more inline with other core Google Apps which is a good thing. It looks like they have core features we expect from Google Apps ( like pretty nifty sharing permissions ).

Google Forms doesn't have the ability to insert pictures or movies yet? I wonder why not. This would be a complete no brainer and let people whip up their quizzes with picture rounds or super-lightweight training videos with questions.

The complete lack of theme editing ability is a worrying trend I'm coming to expect from Google. Like a Google Site theme, you can choose any theme as long as it is white, black or frankly, insultingly stupid. Being able to add a header to your Form would be handy... In fact, it'd be good in all sorts of Google Apps, if Google Apps organisations could do the equivalent of providing branded templates.

So, as I said, I'm always happy to see improvements, but when they're what we expect anyway, or what we never needed, or not what people have been begging for I wonder what's coming next?









Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing a Simple QR Code Stock Control Spreadsheet

By
At Theatre, Film & TV they have lots of equipment they loan to students, cameras, microphone, tripod etc. Keeping track of what goes out and what comes back is a difficult job. I have seen a few other departments struggling with the similar "equipment inventory" problems. A solution I have prototyped uses QR codes, a Google Spreadsheet and a small web application written in Apps Script. The idea is, that each piece of equipment ( or maybe collection of items ) has a QR code on it. Using a standard and free smartphone application to read QR codes, the technician swipes the item and is shown a screen that lets them either check the item out or return it. The QR app looks like this. The spreadsheet contains a list of cameras. It has links to images and uses Google Visualisation tools to generate its QR codes. The spreadsheet looks like this. The Web Application The web application, which only checks items in or out and should be used on a phone in conjunctio
60 comments
Read more

Inserting A Google Doc link into a Google Spreadsheet (UPDATED 6/12/2017)

By
This article looks at using Apps Script to add new features to a Google Spreadsheet. At the University of York, various people have been using Google spreadsheets to collect together various project related information. We've found that when collecting lots of different collaborative information from lots of different people that a spreadsheet can work much better than a regular Google Form. Spreadsheets can be better than Forms for data collection because: The spreadsheet data saves as you are editing. If you want to fill in half the data and come back later, your data will still be there. The data in a spreadsheet is versioned, so you can see who added what and when and undo it if necessary The commenting features are brilliant - especially the "Resolve" button in comments. One feature we needed was to be able to "attach" Google Docs to certain cells in a spreadsheet. It's easy to just paste in a URL into a spreadsheet cell, but they can often
111 comments
Read more

Using Google Spreadsheets To Improve Student Accommodation

By
The Problem Tim Saunders, is fast becoming the poster boy for my belief that getting non-technical people coding is good idea. Tim started in the University of York accommodation office and inherited a task of managing students' requests to change their room. This room changing process was paper-based and requires various peoples' agreement and signatures. It resulted in a student having to carry an increasingly dog-eared form to college administrators and back to Tim and then to the old college administrators. It was slow, actively encouraged signature forging and reliably error prone. All the data collected then needed to be entered into SITS, our student database, which involves various charging and set up costs, so it really helps if this data is correct, having being verified by everyone in the chain. The Solution Armed with a some self-taught Javascript using the online learning platform CodeAcademy , Tim thought that the pile of paper forms in his offic
10 comments
Read more