Besides collecting information, Google Forms can also handle photos, videos and files, which you can include in your form and let respondents upload files in their responses, too. The benefit of this is you don’t have to struggle deciphering and tallying responses on sheets of paper. Best of all, it is totally free. Here’s a roundup of the different ways you can make good use of Google Forms.
1. Surveys
You can use Google Forms to create surveys for free, regardless of the number of questions, design, or responses you get. Once you create a survey, you can save it and convert it into a template to use another time.
If you like, you can add questions, titles, descriptions, images from your computer or the web, videos via URL or YouTube, and sections that organize your survey by question or topic type. A color palette button is also available if you want to apply color to your survey.
Once you send out your survey, just click the Responses tab to check your responses in Google Forms. You can also receive email notifications for new responses. However, if you get lots of responses and just want a quick overview, this is available from the Summary section that displays responses using bar and pie charts. If you prefer to save your responses for later, Google Forms has extra features that let you download them as a CSV file or print them out. When you no longer need more responses, you can deactivate it using a convenient slider.
2. Quizzes or Assessments
This can be for educational for work purposes. You could be a teacher or trainer and want to gauge whether your students clearly understood the course objectives and the lesson in general. Google Forms offers templates you can use to create a quiz or an assessment or even course evaluations and receive the responses and/or feedback from each student or participant.
A variety of question types is available for you to choose from like multiple choice, short answers and more. If it’s a quiz, you can set point values and correct answers for the questions. You can also add automatic feedback for correct or incorrect answers.
For individualized feedback, you can grade questions one by one or batch-grade responses by question.
3. Event RSVP, Invites, and Registration
Are you planning an event like a wedding or party, maybe even a workplace function or business networking meeting and want to get an estimate of who will attend and how many people are available? You can do all this and more using Google Forms.
If you want, you can create your own from scratch or pick a template directly from Google Forms and tweak it to your liking.
Workplace Documentation
There are several ways Google Forms comes in handy in the workplace when you need to create official documentation without a graphic designer’s help. These can be anything from work requests, injury forms, feedback forms and more.
4. Work Request
Google Forms offers a template for Work Request forms, which is simple and basic with information fields like name, email address, description, due date, and more. There’s also the Type section that distinguishes the work department or specific designation. Here, you can use short answers or multiple choice and update answers based on your business.
You can also set up transfer forms in just minutes if transfers are allowed at your workplace or team-update forms to send out or receive updates from your team or employees.
5. Time Off Request
This helps with management of leave days and off days where staff members include their names, the date and time of day, off or leave day and the type of leave they’re requesting. There’s a convenient section that gives them leeway to describe their reason for requesting leave, but it’s optional. Another form you can create is an injury form with specific questions like time and date of the injury, where it happened, and its severity.
6. Customer Feedback
This form can be used to seek feedback from clients or employees, whether its about a service or product or a recent training in the case of staff feedback. You can also add drop-down box questions and multiple choice answers or paragraph questions to get more detailed information.
7. Contact form
This is a great way of getting feedback from customers – for example if you run a website or company blog. Visitors to your site may want an easy way to connect besides social media or official emails, and the contact form is the perfect channel. In Google Forms you can create a contact form from scratch or use a template and embed it on a page to collect readers’ comments and standard information like name, phone number, and email address in a Google Sheet.
Wrap-up
There’s so much you can do using Google Forms, but our list gives you a foretaste of how it can work to help you get the information you want and achieve your objectives, whether for personal or business use. However, these aren’t cast in stone. Google Forms can be used across sectors, even for political campaigns, and much more, so feel free to explore it for your specific use case. What else have you used Google Forms for? Let us know in a comments below.
