How to use Question Logic in Google Forms

Can Google Forms do skip page logic and conditional branching? Absolutely! And in this video, Scott Friesen shows you exactly how to set it up for your next form or survey. Whether you want to use it for business, education, or personal use, send people to specific questions based on their answers with section logic in Google Forms.

Video Transcript

​When people fill out your form, would you like to send them to some more specific questions, depending on how they've answered earlier questions? Well, in today's video, I'm gonna show you everything you need to know about conditional branching right here within Google Forms. Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And using question logic can be so powerful. Maybe you're a business owner, or you're a website administrator, and when someone is using your Contact Us form, you want to send them to some more specific information or specific questioning, depending on what they've selected earlier in the form. Or perhaps you're a teacher, or a trainer, and you want to create a quiz and give some specific options or specific questions depending on how your students have answered that form. Well, in today's video, I'm gonna share with you everything you need to know. Here we have an example of a Contact Us form, and it's pretty simple and straightforward at this point in time. I'm asking for their name, I'm asking for their email address, and down below, I'm asking a very important question. What type of help are you looking for? And I've given them three options, Sales, Support, and General Inquiry. Now, what I could do is add a text field down below and hope that they fill in all the information that I'm wanting from them, based on whatever their needs are. But what I'd rather do is that based on their answer to this question, send them to something a lot more specific. So for example, if they select Sales, I'd like to send them to a part of the form where it shows a list of all of my products or services, and then they can select one of them or tell me more about one of them. Maybe if they select Support, I give them a list of the different needs and issues that people most commonly face. Are you facing a login issue? Is it the website? Is it some other technical support that you need? And maybe if they select General, that's where I'll reserve the free-form open paragraph so they can just type in whatever it is that they want. But I want to take this opportunity to give them some more specific information so I can receive more specific information in return. So in order to do this, we need to create sections. So here on the right-hand side, the last icon is Add Section. I'm gonna select that, and now you can see this first part of the form is labeled section one of two, and we have section two of two. Now you can actually use sections without conditional branching. Sections can be great to just break up your form into smaller chunks, so instead of giving them 27 different questions where they have to scroll through a long page, you can give them just three or four questions at a time. However, if you are wanting to use conditional branching, sections are a must. You need them to tell Google Forms where to send people, depending on the answers that they've selected. So this first one here, we're just gonna call Sales, and I'm gonna keep my example relatively simple. I'm gonna add a question here, and the question is simply gonna be, "Tell-", oops, "Tell me more." Just a short answer question. And in order to make my other sections, I'm just gonna select Duplicate Section. I'm gonna select that. Now section three is going to be about Support, and then I'm gonna do this one last time, and section four will be labeled General. Okay, so now I've got my three additional sections. And another thing to keep note of is at the bottom of each section, we have an option as to what's going to happen when the user gets to this point. We're gonna come back to this in just a moment because it's very important as well. So here are our three different sections. Remember, these sections can contain as much detailed information as you want. You can have further multiple choice, and dropdown, and check boxes, and other fields for them to contain. Maybe in Sales I have six additional questions, whereas in Support, maybe I will only have two additional questions. Depending on your needs, you can fill these out as much as you like. So when we come back to this important question where things are going to split off, we wanna select it, and we wanna come down to these three dots. And here, we want to say, Go to section based on answer. By selecting this option here, we have an additional dropdown menu beside each of these three questions. So for example here, I don't want it to just continue to the next section. In this case, actually, that's not too bad. If they selected Sales, that's fine. But to be on the safe side, I'm gonna actually select Sales specifically, because what if I come back in here at a later time and I add further sections, and Sales is not necessarily the one right after this one. For Support, we're gonna do the same thing. We're gonna say Select Support, and then for General, we're gonna select General. Now keep in mind, not every one of your answers needs to go to a different section. Maybe, depending on their options here, they can just submit the form at that point in time. It doesn't mean that whatever choice that you're given here, every one has to have a separate section. You could just choose for them to submit the form, or to continue to the next section if that's appropriate. It's also important to keep in mind that there are only two question types in which you can use this type of branching, that is, multiple choice or a dropdown menu. You'll have to use one of those two choices in order to use this type of logic. So now that we've set things up here, the other thing that we want to keep in mind is if we need to make this a required field, because if they don't choose this, as things are stated right now, it's going to continue to the next section. They're gonna automatically come into Sales. Well, you probably don't want that to happen. What we could do is this. We could select this and say, Submit the form, meaning that if you don't make this a required field, then the form will just be submitted, and at least you'll have their name and their email address. But if we select this question, we can say Required, which may be a smart move if you want to make sure you push them through to one of the sections that you've already set up. Now, we also wanna come down to the three sections that we've created, and take a look at what they say after their section. So in this case, I want them to just submit the form. I don't want them to fill out all the sales information and then go to Support. No, they selected Sales, they've given me the sales information, that's it, they can submit the form at this point in time. So I'm going to come down here and select Submit the Form. I'm gonna come down to Support, and I'm gonna say Select Submit the Form. Now, in the last section, you can see I don't have that option. That's because it's the last section. It's automatically just going to submit the form at that time. It looks like we are ready to go. Maybe one other note is that when it comes to these additional sections, we could continue to branch off if desired. Maybe when they get to Support, I'm gonna ask them three questions, and then branch off to even more. At a certain point, it might get a little complicated, maybe even get a little confusing to you, as the form creator, as to where things are going, but you can continue to branch out and have this type of conditional formatting within your form. All right, at this case, let's take a look at the preview and see what it's gonna look like to the end user. I'm gonna select the Preview icon here on the top right, and here we have that first section, right? I can fill in my name, I can fill in my email address, and when I select Sales and hit Next, it should take us directly to Sales. Perfect. It's behaving as expected. Let's go back and select Support. I'm gonna hit Next, and boom, we're back into the Support page. If I go back once more, and I select General Inquiry, it's gonna take me directly to General. So a very powerful tool if you want to drill down, get more specific information from the people who are filling out your forms so you can receive some more specific details. Now, if you'd like to learn even more about Google Forms, especially if you're wanting to create a quiz, I invite you to click on the video down below. Thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact it's very simple.