How to find Google Forms Add-Ons
- [Scott] Would you like to add some more advanced functionality to your Google Forms, including the ability to limit responses, send custom emails, and even turn it into a custom booking calendar?
Well in this video, I'm going to show you how to use three add-ons that every Google Forms user should know. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
And Google Forms is great for creating surveys, quizzes, and really any type of form that you like.
But sometimes there is some functionality that we can't simply add or change within the settings. So let's take a look at how we can get more out of our Google Forms.
And by doing so, we are going to be using some add-ons. Now to add a add-on or to search for add-ons, all you need to do is select the more icon here
within any Google form. We're going to come all the way down to the bottom and select Get add-ons. And here we will be brought to the Google Workspace marketplace.
Limit form responses
And the first one that we are going to be looking at is called formLimiter. I'm going to click on it right here. This is what it looks like. Don't be confused by the number of other tools that may have a limiting option as well.
Often there will be a number of different add-ons that serve a very similar purpose but we are going to us formLimiter. All you need to do is select install. And now if we select this puzzle piece icon, you will have access to all of your add-ons.
So let's select formLimiter, and we are going to select Set limit. How often have you wanted to give a specific date and time as a end date? Or maybe you want to limit the number of responses after you've received a certain number of responses such as 50, or maybe the first 100.
Well, we can apply either of those types of limits with the formLimiter add-on.
And it's really simple to set up. Here in the bottom right hand corner of the screen our first option is to choose what type of limit do we want to apply. Is it going to be a date and time, or a number of form responses?
FormLimiter actually gives us one further option here if we want to choose a specific spreadsheet cell value. But let's stay with the first two options because I think they would be the most common.
So first up is date and time, and maybe I'm only going to have this form available through to the end of the month. So here I can select the date. I'm going to say August 31st and I can also select a specific time. I'm going to say 11:55 PM, and hit Set.
Now the last thing that we need to review before we hit Save and enable is this message that people will receive if they choose to submit the form after this due date. Now by default, it's going to say the following.
This form is no longer accepting responses, and has been set to automatically close by my email address. And in many cases, I don't want to show that. So I can customize this message. Maybe I'm just happy with the first part here.
Just allowing people to know why their form has not been submitted. But of course, you can add further details here as well if you want to redirect them to another webpage, if you'd like to invite them to contact you, or if you want to include a custom support email address.
So make sure you review this default message
and change it to your liking. Lastly, this checkbox is checked by default. Email the form owner when submissions are closed. And I would recommend that you keep this checked because you don't want to be puzzled as to why am I not receiving any responses from this forum.
This is a helpful reminder which will only be sent when you have reached this limit. Now at this stage we can say Save and enable and it will apply this limit to this form.
But let's quickly go back and take a look at the number of form responses because maybe there's a case where you only want to allow the first 10 or the first 25 forms to be submitted. With this option selected, the only thing that we need to think about is the number itself, and maybe I'm going to choose the number 25. Our default message has stayed the same.
It won't change as you toggle back and forth but maybe I want to let them know that I've only accepted the first 25.
I can add that information here as well. And now going forward, this limited form response will be applied.
Custom form notifications & email
Next, let's take a look at how we can receive better notifications when people submit a form, but also allow ourselves to send them a custom email message once they've submitted.
So for this purpose, we are going to use an add-on called Form Notifications. And this add-on is actually developed by Google themselves. After hitting install and giving a permission,n it will also appear here within your add-ons options.
So after selecting Form Notifications, we want to select Open from the dialogue which is presented.
And again, we will be presented with an interface in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. Now here we actually have two options available to us. The first one has to do if we want to be notified of form responses,
and the one below is if we want to send anyone who submits a form, a custom thank you message. So let's start with the first one. If I want to be notified of form responses,
I can toggle this on and by default, the email address associated with my Google Forms account will be displayed here.
But I don't have to use this address. I can get rid of it and add something else, or I can come down below and start to enter in other email addresses if I want others to be notified as well.
The only other option that we need to choose here is how often do we want to receive those notifications?
And this can be really helpful if you don't want to receive a notification for every single response. So here, maybe I can enter in the number 10. Meaning, I only want to receive a response after every 10 submissions.
Maybe it'll be just a gentle reminder for me to come in here and to check in on all of those responses. If I do want a notification for every single response, well I would simply enter in the number one.
Now I'm just going to untoggle this for a moment as we look at the second option down below, but you're not limited to only one. You can have both of these turned on at the same time.
With the thank you email option turned on, we can go be on just the simple message which is set up under Settings. You may be familiar with the presentation area here where we can edit the confirmation message.
But remember, this message will only be displayed on the screen immediately after they fill out the form. Nothing will be sent to their inbox. So here with thank you email toggled on,
we can choose to customize that message. Now the first thing that we'll need to choose is which is going to be the email address that we are collecting. If I did not already have an email address included in my form, I could choose this automatically option.
But I'm going to select form field, and here I could choose any other form if it was listed or described in a different way but I've chosen to describe it as the email address. This is what it's going to be using to send out those emails.
Down below, I can add my own email address or someone else if I want to send a copy to someone. And then I can choose both my email subject line and the body of my email down below.
These are simply just the defaults that are included here
but of course, I could add so much more detail if I want to provide them further information or when they can expect to hear from me or maybe I want to add links that they can follow, I can do that here as well.
And remember, if you come down here to this little icon, you can always drag if you need more room as you're filling out the body of that email. When you're finished, all you need to do is hit Save configuration.
And now each time that someone fills out this form, they will receive that custom email message.
Add form booking calendar
Last but not least, let's turn our form into a custom booking calendar.
Because although you may be familiar with other tools such as Calendly, they don't give you the ability to add as much detail and additional questions as you can add here
within Google Forms. But if you want people to be able to book time on your calendar with custom time slots, we can do that right here within Google Forms. So to get started, we will first need to go back to our add-ons marketplace and install the Booking Calendar add-on. Once installed, again, we will be able to find it here
in the Add-ons menu. Now just before I show you how to set up the add-on
within Google Forms, we first want to go to our Google Calendar because here is where we will set up the available slots that people can choose from within our Google Form. What we want to do is come down here and create a new calendar.
Remember, you can create as many calendars as you need within Google Calendar
and this is going to keep things separate from your primary or main calendar.
So I'm going to say that this is my booking calendar, just so I can see it that it's different from everything else. And I'm going to select Create calendar Now when I go to view the list of all of my calendars here is my new booking calendar.
Separate from my other calendars which I can toggle on or off. Next, we want to be able to create the event times which people can book.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with tomorrow at 11:00 AM, and I'm going to create this bonus coaching call. Remember, whatever you include here is exactly what others will see when they book this time and it becomes added to their calendar.
So you'll want to pay special attention to the description field, and if you need to provide a link as well. Let's just add some sample welcome text here. And let's pretend that I've added a Zoom link down below.
Now Google Calendar makes it really easy for us to repeat a single event. So what I like to do is create one of these slots and then come down to this repeat bar and select Custom. And now what I can choose to do is select all the days
in which I want to add this time. So maybe I want to say every weekday, I want to be able to include a possible slot. And I'm going to say that we're going to make this available just for the next 10 occurrences.
I'm going to hit Done, and then I'm going to hit Save. And now as we come back to our week view, you can see I have 10 slots that have been made available for the coming two weeks. Next, let's go back to our Google Form.
And we are going to select the Booking Calendar and select Configure Booking Calendar. Now it may take just a few seconds to load and then we can start configuring the settings that we want for this booking option. So our very first choice here is to Select the Calendar.
That's why we started by creating that new booking calendar. Here you will see a list of all of the calendars available to us. But of course, we want to now choose that Booking Calendar and hit Save.
It lets us know that the selected calendar has been save and we can select Next. Next, we need to create the sync dropdown field. By selecting this button, it will create a special dropdown field.
This is where users will be able to select their desired time. And don't worry, we can change the name of this field after we're done. I'm going to hit Next, and it's going to take us to the next step in the process.
Here it needs to know where to find the user's email address. And like we saw in our previous add-ons, we can choose from the other fields in this form. In this case, we want to keep it at the email address and hit Save.
We then hit Next, and it will tell us that all of the requirements are met. And now we can see that those slots which we have created within Google Calendar are now made available here, so that a user will be able to use a dropdown menu.
Now we can always come back in here and choose a few other options or go back and change some of the options, but let's go ahead and see how this looks to the end user. I can always minimize this option here.
And the first thing I'm going to do is come up and change the title of it. Instead of event slots, I'm going to say, Please select a time. Of course, you can add as much or little information here as you like.
But now if we come up and select the preview option, here is what the form will look like. They will fill in their name, their email address, and down below, we have a nice clean dropdown menu which includes all of the available times.
So I'm going to choose August 24th in this case and I'm going to select Submit. Now when I return to my Google Calendar, you'll notice that something is a little different from my other options.
Here you can see that this August 24th time slot has changed to the color purple. I actually really like this feature because it lets me know which has been booked and which are still available to others.
And when I click on the details of this event, here you can see the email address of the person who submitted this request.
All of my meeting details will be listed down below. And it will even let me know
that the submitter booked this event via this particular form. So both myself and the attendee have all of the information needed to make this meeting happen.
Now if we go back and attempt to submit another form, the great thing about this feature is of course, that August 24 slot is now no longer available. It will automatically remove that from the choices here because someone has booked that time already.
Back within the booking calendar interface, I can also choose to skip displaying events
that are too close to the current time.
So maybe I want to change this to perhaps 10 hours, meaning nothing within 10 hours will be displayed to those users. And lastly, I can also choose to minimize or change the number of maximum slots.
This is really helpful so that you are not displaying a very, very long dropdown list. You can still have those slots available on your Google Calendar but you can minimize what they see within your Google form.
Remember to hit Save once you've made any changes here and then that will be applied to your form immediately. Now I would love to hear from you next, which of today's three add-ons do you find will be most helpful? Or do you have an add-on that you would like to share with others? Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.
And if you'd like to receive more tips and tricks on how to simplify your software directly to your inbox, be sure to sign up for the Simpletivity newsletter. Thank you so much for watching.
And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
