How To Use Google Forms (with Gemini)

To get started, go to forms new. If you've got Gemini, this is the first screen you're going to see. And all we have to do is write a prompt to create the form that we want. There are a few ideas already on screen here. An order form for a bakery or even a newsletter signup. I want to create an inquiry form for people who are interested in booking me for training. I'm writing quite a detailed prompt here, but if you're not sure where to start yourself, then a simple prompt is a great way to start. Now, you might be creating a form, let's say, for an event that you're running. And if you had a relevant document, you could actually type the at@ symbol and then search for a document within your drive that would help Google Forms create something super relevant. I'm not going to do that this time, but I think it's a great tip and something that will help save you time. Now, I click create and Gemini in Google Forms is going to get to work and create the form that I've asked for. So, it shows me a preview here. It looks like we're asking for email address, name, whether it's online or not. Okay, perfect. I'm going to click create form. Now, if you don't have Gemini or you need to make changes to add questions, you use this toolbar on the right hand side. I want to add one more question which asks whether there are other people to include on a follow-up email as well. So, I mouse over, click on add question, type my question in the text box here. I'm just asking any other email addresses I should include in the follow-up. And then you can choose the question type on the right hand side here as well. Now, I'm just going to choose a short answer for this. People can still type as much as they want, but it doesn't take up as much space on the screen. And I want to move this further down. So I'm going to click and hold on this handle here and just drag it underneath the company name question here. And in fact, I think the email address question should probably go just above that one. So I'm going to put that down here as well. Now, whilst Gemini has done a good job with the form, I definitely want to make tweaks before I get into designing it. So I'm going to click on the name question to start with. And I can make this required, which means people can't submit the form without filling out that question. And in fact, pretty much every question on my form here is required. So I'm going to go through and do that for each one. And for some of these questions, I want to include a little bit more detail. So let's take this group size question as an example. I'm actually going to change it to a question. I'm going to make it say, how many people are in your group? And I want to add a description to explain in a bit more detail what I mean. So I click the three dots here and choose description. And you see it gives me this extra description space here. In there, I'm just going to write an estimate is fine. I really like using the description space to kind of answer any questions that I think people might have whilst they're filling out the form. What I'm also going to do is highlight this and make it in italics as well. Sometimes when you're creating your form, you might want it to span across multiple pages so that people aren't overwhelmed with everything in that first page or you might need to ask for certain information based on an answer that they've previously given. So in my example here, let's imagine that if they answer in person, I need to capture some more details. But for all the other ones, we can just go ahead and submit the form. An advanced feature in Google Forms allows me to send people to a different section of the form based on the answer they choose. And a section is really just a page. So before I choose any options over here, what I'm going to do on the toolbar on the right is click add section. And you see because I was on that question, it's added the section and also put a couple of questions in it. So I'm just going to drag those back up to the previous section like this. And I'm going to call the title of this section inperson details. In this section, I'm just going to have one extra question. I'm just asking if they have a suitable venue already or if they'd like me to find one as part of the training. Now, with some questions in Google Forms, it will give you suggestions for the answers. So, I can click on those answers that I want to add, just yes or no. I'm actually going to add a bit more detail. And again, I'm going to make this required. Now, if I go back to that question where I ask them where they want to run the training, I click on it, click on those three dots on the bottom right again, and choose go to section based on answer. That gives me these extra options here. And for these, I want them all to just go straight away to submit the form except for the in-person one. I'm going to click I recommend never choosing continue to next section. Instead, choose the section here because it means if you move things around, it will always go to the correct section. So, I'm going to choose inperson details for this one. Submit form and submit form again. All right, I'm pretty happy with the content of my form right now. Now then I've gone through I've looked at all the questions. I've made things required and I've added a section and sent people to that section based on their responses to one of my questions. You can go ahead and add more questions if you want. But now let's move on to designing the form. This purple color doesn't match my branding. So the first thing I'm going to do is click up on this palette icon where it says customize theme at the top of the screen. And before I choose any colors or fonts, I'm going to click choose image. And I've got a header image that I've designed in Canva. I'm going to link it in the description so that you can use that as a template for your own. Go to browse and I'm going to select that file. Click open. It shows me the image here and you can resize it if you want to, but that's good. And click done. Now Google Forms is going to look at that image and pull the colors from that image to make life easier for me here. For some reason, it's chosen one part of my skin tone, but I'm going to actually select this green here. And I want the background color just to be gray. I like things pretty clean. You can also change the fonts. I tend to use a font called Intertight for titles like this. and all my questions I'm going to set to enter. And same with the text. That's the text in the responses when people are filling it out. All right, I'm really happy with the styling as it is. So now let's move on to how we share this with people. There are two reasons you might want to share a form. The first is to collaborate with your colleagues. Maybe you want them to make edits to the form or check it over before you send it out. And the second is to send it to people who are actually going to complete it, your respondents. The first step for sharing with either of those groups is to click this share button at the top of the screen here. And when I click that, I get a few different options here. Now, if you're used to sharing Google Docs and other items in the Google Drive ecosystem, this probably looks familiar, but it is slightly different to everything else. So, let's imagine I want to add my colleague Tanya to be able to edit. I type in her name here. I click on her name, and then I can choose whether she can just respond to this or whether she's an editor. I want to make her an editor so that she can collaborate on it. If I want to, I can leave a message and then I send it. When someone else is editing the form, you can see that they're editing it because a color appears on the left hand side of a question. And if I mouse over it, I see their name on the left as well. Now that my colleagues have looked over everything, it's time to get this ready to send to the people that are actually going to fill out the form. You've got a few options here. You can keep forms private to individual people. Let's say you've got a small group of say five or 10 that you want to fill it out. Or you could just make it internal so that anyone in your whole business can complete it. Or you can make it public so that anyone in the world with the link to the form can fill it out. So again, I'm going to click on the share button at the top of the screen here. We already saw how to add individual people. If you want to simply type in their email address, make them a responder and then share it. But I want to make this available to anyone on the internet because anyone might want to book a workshop with me. So at the bottom here it says responder view. At the moment it's limited to just my organization called howto tech. But if I click here I can say anyone with the link. That's the first step. Even if I shared the link right now people wouldn't be able to actually fill it out. So I click done. And before I publish this so that people can fill it out. I'm going to click on this eye icon at the top of the screen to preview what it's going to look like. So here's my preview. At the top of the screen it tells me we're in preview mode. It also tells me it isn't published yet. So, if I was to copy the link and send this to someone, they wouldn't get access to it. And I can maybe even fill it out myself just to give it a test. If you've set up a question that branches to a different section, you probably want to test that now as well. So, I can give that a go here. Click in person, choose next, and it goes through to the next section properly. And if you're happy that everything's working, we're just going to close this tab and go back to the tab where we're editing the form. Then, we're going to click the publish button on the top right of the screen here. You see, I already set the responders so that anyone with the link can fill this out. Now, this is where you would share out your link. So, at the top of the screen, there's a button here that says copy responder link. I'm going to click that. It gives me a long link here. If I click shorten URL, it will give me a slightly shorter one. And I can copy that, maybe email it out to people, post it on my social media, whatever works for the context of the form that you're using. We've created the form. We've shared it with people who we want to collaborate on it or fill it out. So, the final thing we need to do is check the responses. Once they start coming in, you'll see a number next to the responses tab at the top of the screen. So, let's click on there. And the first tab we get in here is a summary of all the responses. So, if I scroll down, I see all of the answers to each individual question in the different sections here. And for some questions, Gemini is going to offer to summarize the responses for you. This is really good if, for example, you've asked for feedback. You haven't got time to read hundreds of rows of responses, but you want to get a general feel for how people liked the training workshop or whatever it is you're asking them about. I just click on summarize responses and Gemini gives me a quick summary of everything it sees in that question's responses. Back at the top of this page then I can also look at responses by question which might be helpful in some cases. So I can choose the question like dates for example and it will show me all of the responses to that date question. I see two left it blank. I've got one for this date and one for this date. Or I can click on individual and then this will show me the form as it was filled out by each individual person. So I can see this was Dave here and all the answers he gave and I can scroll through and look at the other people as well. Now if you want to analyze this data yourself, the best way to do that is to link the form to Google Sheets by clicking the button at the top here. It will ask if you want to create a new spreadsheet or link this to an existing one. I'm just going to create a new one like this. And now every time a new response comes in, it's going to be automatically added to the spreadsheet as a row as well as back in the form editing screen that we saw earlier. If you're not that confident with spreadsheets, you might want to check out a couple of previous videos that I've made that will help you make use of all of this data in this sheet. So, you're now able to create a form from beginning to end. But, let's take the next couple of minutes to look at some of the hidden settings and tricks that you might want to make use of to make your form even better and more helpful for you. It's worth taking a look at the settings tab at the top of the screen in Google Forms here because there are a number of different settings. You can actually make self-marking quizzes in forms, but we won't cover that today. You can also do things like allow people to edit their responses after they've submitted. This will give them a link. If they visit that link, they can edit and then resubmit or limit people to only responding to the form once. But if you do that, they will need to log into a Google account, which can be a barrier to some people if you want to get a broad range of responses. Now, I already created a separate question to collect email addresses, but if you enable that option here, you can either choose verified, which means people will need to be logged into a Google account and it will use their Google email address, or responder input, which kind of does the same thing that we've already set up. If I choose verified, what I can then do is automatically send people a copy of the response so they've got it for their records either when they request it or just for everyone. Under presentation, you've got the option to add a progress bar at the bottom, which might be helpful if your form is many pages long and you want to give people an idea where they're at. And one thing I think is pretty crucial is to edit the confirmation message that comes up after they've submitted the form. You can put anything you like in here, like how long it's going to take you to respond or any other relevant information. Maybe if it's an event, it could include the venue information and so on. This is the last thing they see after they've hit the submit button on the form. If you're doing some kind of poll or survey maybe internally in your company, you might want everyone to be able to see the results for fun. So, you can enable that here as well. And if you stayed this far, you get my top tip for using Google Forms, which is to go back to the responses tab, click on the three dots at the top here, and then click on get email notifications for new responses. And that means you will get an email in your inbox every time someone fills out the form. It's a really invaluable way to keep on top of inquiries, especially in forms like this one that I've used as the example today. It's likely that there's a deadline to filling out your form. So, the very last thing you're probably going to want to do is click back on the published button at the top of the screen. And then toggle accepting responses to off. And that will stop people from being able to fill it out. And you can even put a custom message here. Something like, "Apologies, the deadline has now passed. If you've got any questions, here's my email address." By the way, I send a weekly tip every Wednesday for free to my email subscribers of Workspace Boost. Click the link in the description to sign up and you'll get the first tip in your inbox straight away. So, I hope that was a helpful look at how to use Google Forms with Gemini to help you save time. If you've got any questions, drop them in the comments.