How to use Google Forms to collect data online

There are numerous ways of collecting data from a mass and one of the best ways to do so, is to use forms. We are living in the digital era, and one of the best ways to collect information from a number of people whether, in office, locality,  from a community or from a mass gathering is by using digital forms. With digital forms, you don’t have the trouble of distributing them among the people, nor you will have to collect the same after the form is filled up. Besides that, there are hardly any chances that forms will be cancelled by marking certain field mandatory to fill up.

Google has a number of services and one of them is the Google Forms, which is one of the best ways to collect data digitally from a mass. Once the user completes filling up the form he can easily submit the form online and all the information will be collected in each field in the form of a Google Sheet If you find it important.  However, the responses within a form can also be seen normally. What you just need to do is shared the link of the form and the concerned persons can easily open the link to fill in the form and submit the same.

The steps to create a Google Form

Step 1: Open Google Forms on your PC web browser and click on the ‘Blank’ Button to start creating a new form. Alternatively, you can even create a form from the existing templates if one of them suits your requirements.

Step 2: If it is the first time that you are opening Google Forms,  you can either take a tour of Google Forms or cancel it by clicking on ‘No Thanks’.

Step 3: First, you have to enter the subject of the form, and you can even add a short description of the form to inform others about the reason the information is collected from the concerned persons.

Step 4: Now depending upon what kind of information you are collecting within forms, there are a number of options to collect the answer in the form of multiple-choice questions,  linear grid, checkboxes, short texts, or an item from an existing drop-down menu and many more.

But before that, you will have to enter the question for which the answer is to be collected and the description of the question if any.

 

Here is a sample question on whether a person is vegetarian or non-vegetarian or vegan,  description of the question, and the answers will be collected in the form of radio buttons or multiple choice questions as shown below. 

Step 5: Next, you can even add additional questions or can even import them from an existing database or sheet. Depending upon the questions in the form, you can even import photos and videos to the form.

Step 6: Next, I have a question about how much a person can contribute and will collect the answers as an item form a drop-down menu.

Step 7: Lastly, you can enter a title for the form and click on ‘Send’.

Step 8: If answering a particular question is mandatory, just turn on ‘Required’ corresponding to the question. You can even use the triple dot icon to add a description to your question, shuffle the available options, etc.

Step 9: Now, you can either email the form or can even embed it in your website, or just share the form URL to share it via WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or by different other ways.

Step 10: Now you can easily share the form to collect data. 

Step 11: To find the collected data, just click on responses. Here the responses will be visible to you on opening the URL, however, you can even collect all the responses in a sheet on Google Sheets. Just click on the Google Sheets icon in the ‘Responses’ section, and create a new sheet for collecting the responses or an already existing sheet to collect the responses.

Step 12: The Google sheet with all the collected data will be available in the home folder of your Google Drive. The sheet will be updated in real-time, along with the timestamp of the response.

After the information or data is collected from all the individuals, you can even download the data collected from all the individuals in the form of a ‘CSV’ file which too, is optional. The collected data can also be displayed in a pie chart to help you understand the trend of filling up the form.

Google Forms is one of the best ways to collect data from a number of individuals without any hassle at all and you can even get email notifications each time somebody fills up a form. Using artificial intelligence or AI, Google can even determine the type of answer that will possibly be collected for a particular type of question. There are a number of other small neat tools which can help you collect data through forms exactly the way you want.

I think collecting information or data from a number of individuals will now be a breeze for you.  Do you have any questions in mind about it? Feel free to comment on the same below.