Saturday, May 24, 2008

Google Docs: The Do's and Don't's

The Official Google Docs Blog recently has posted an article about relevant and irrelevant using forms feature of Google Docs in order to re-arrange questions or otherwise change the spreadsheet underlying the form, so Google Docs says, they are actively working on it to fix these issues. In addition, Google Docs Blog has added a chart to show you the Do's and Don't's to create your own forms using forms feature of Google Docs.
Here are detailed points of the chart:

From the FORM
Do:
  1. re-arrange questions using the up/down icons on the left of the question being edited
  2. delete questions you want removed from the form. Note: the spreadsheet column will NOT be deleted, so you won't lose any prior responses, but it will no longer be filled with any new data.
From the SPREADSHEET
Do:
  1. insert columns for your own data - calculations, notes, etc - which are not in the form.
  2. insert rows under your column headers to create calculations of results (such as counts of each answer, etc. New form responses will always be added after the last row with any content.
Don't:
  1. DON'T try to re-arrange questions by cutting/pasting portions of columns OR whole columns.
  2. DON'T delete columns that are in the form - they will not be deleted from the form and will eventually re-appear in the spreadsheet (next time you edit the form) as the first available column at the end of your current columns.
  3. DON'T change column header text, as the next edit of the form will overwrite those back to whatever they are on the form... make all changes to question titles on the form and those will be transferred to the spreadsheet column headers (overwriting what's there).
  4. DON'T expect re-ordering of questions in the form to change the order of columns in the spreadsheet.

Google Docs Help Center
Google Docs Community Channel on YouTube

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