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Showing posts from October, 2013

Strange Problem With Older Google Forms

I've had two people complaining about this this week. If you have a Google Form in a spreadsheet that was made a while ago, you are still given the old form editing interface. There doesn't seem to be a way to bring a Google Form up-to-date, which is a big pain if your form is very long and complex since the only way to do so is to just start all over again.

Linking a Google Doc To a Form For Assessment

In the previous blog post , I showed how we get data from a Form and render it into a Google Document. In this post, I want to show how the Document, as it is created can have a link appended to it to another Google Form that will be used for marking that document. We have used this where people are submitting application forms and lecturers are grading those applications. First, create your new evaluation form, deciding what field will be autopopulated with data from the application form, for example, student name and institution etc. Also add the form items you want to use for marking, which might include drop down menus or multiple choice or paragraph text areas.  and then select then choose the menu Responses > Get pre-filled URL. Once you have filled in this form you will be able to add some code to your Google Spreadsheet like this... and work out which value you need to map onto the bit that says...  entry.1021949580 ...obviously all of these will need changing for yo

Using Google Docs To Make Google Spreadsheets Easier to Read

A lot of our staff are using Google Forms to gather lots of data into spreadsheets, from Grant Application forms to self assessment questionnaires and more. Spreadsheets are of course great places to store lots of data, but when that data is mainly textual , it is ridiculously hard to read and edit in a spreadsheet. Our solution has been to generate a Google Doc of the data in a row of data. Sometimes this happens automatically and is emailed to the relevant people and sometimes we add a little interface to be able to say "Make a Google Doc with this row" to the spreadsheet. The challenge is making it easy to set up. Our Solution We've used this a few times. First we create our Google Form and add some data. The spreadsheet now has a list of column headers across the top. Now, we make a template Google Doc. In Tools > Script Editor we add some code that allows us to insert the spreadsheet header names as funny tags, like this, {Username}. You could of cour