How To Make Surveys with Google Forms

The Google Drive suite of cloud apps is becoming a popular and powerful way to get work done, but there’s more to it than a word processor. While most productivity apps have a Google equivalent, most people don’t know that Google Drive has an awesome survey tool. In this guide, I’m going to show you how to make surveys with Google Forms.

Give Me A Reason

Unless you were specifically searching for a way to make surveys, you may be asking yourself why you would even care about a free survey tool in Google Drive. OK, fair question. Let me break down some use cases for you. That way you’ll have a good idea of why you’d want to make surveys with Google Forms.

• You’re getting married and you want to compile the gift register
• Gather client feedback for your performance review.
• Compile info for a work report.
• You want to have an easy way for people to register for a party or event.

Basically, whenever you either need info from a lot of people or need to capture a lot of repetitive info yourself, something like Google Forms is perfect.

Show Me What You Got

When you make surveys with With Google Forms, you create an online questionnaire that can be easily shared with anyone. You can even print it out, although that sort of defeats the point of an online form. The responses are captured live and instantly to an online spreadsheet.

Sharing your survey form is as easy as emailing or posting a link. The only real downside is that you have no idea if someone has submitted twice. Stopping people from submitting more than once is something that paid survey systems can do, but it’s not a feature of Forms at the moment.

You can, however, collect Google usernames as a way to detect duplicate submissions, but any people who aren’t on Google obviously won’t get tagged.

In reality, that’s probably not going to be an issue. At least not to the point where it will matter.

Let’s Make  Surveys with Google Forms

If you don’t already have a Google account for some weird reason, now is the time to open one. Having a Google account will give you access to the full range of free cloud tools, whether you use them or not.

There are two ways to create a new Google Form. You can navigate to your Google Drive by going to drive.google.com and create a new form by clicking new>more>Google Forms.

Alternatively, just go directly to forms.google.com and start a blank form or a template form.

Step 1: Make Something New

Now that you’ve managed to make surveys with Google Forms, you’ll be greeted with a blank document just waiting for you to turn it into something useful.