Entering Data via Form
I did a presentation at the COCA Conference in February with a good friend and we introduced our audience to the concept of Google Spreadsheets. The focus wasn’t about how to do spreadsheets but about how to do more with spreadsheets by adding the added power that comes with online collaboration.
Part of the activity involved updating a spreadsheet with current contact information for COCA members. Not all of the invitations went to active accounts that people could use immediately. i.e. forgotten passwords, etc.
So we immediately switched to Plan B and used a new feature with Google Spreadsheets. In addition to publishing a spreadsheet for collaborative work, you can now post a form to the web. Why is that so exciting?
It’s exciting because you can collect the information anonymously! Visitors don’t have to be invited to the spreadsheet. They don’t have to wade their way through a spreadsheet interface either.
All that you have to do is provide the address to the form and your visitors complete it and submit. The results are piped back into your spreadsheet. Google Spreadsheets even includes a time and date stamp for when the data was entered.
How do you create the form? Even easier. Log onto your Google Docs account and create a spreadsheet of the results you want to collect. Then, choose the Form button to create your form!
Or, create the spreadsheet as you develop the form by selecting a New Form from the "New" document menu in Google Docs.
Can anyone say quick and easy surveys? Collect info? No more hacking around with server side scripts? Here's a picture of a quick form that I created from a very simple spreadsheet with three columns.
Or, try it out by following this link.
This is very exciting and a potentially huge addition to your set of web tools because it is quickly and easily aggregated into a spreadsheet in your Google account. Download the spreadsheet or work with your data online. As we showed yesterday, it’s a snap to bring that data into Fathom or Tinkerplots for the power that those Ministry licensed products offered.
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