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The article Using Google Forms / Drive / Docs to create an online survey regularly receives comments. I realized that people come across similar issues, so I decided to write this article as a FAQ. I do not consider myself a Google Forms expert and Google can evolve the product at any time, making my articles outdated. However, you can probably find the answer to your question in this FAQ (hopefully).

When a user wants to respond to the form, he / she has to connect to Google first, is it normal?

You must disable the option “Only allow one response per person” that forces people to connect to their Google account. Be aware that without this option on, people can potentially answer the form several times.

How to prevent a person to answer the survey several times?

To have more confidence in the results, you can enable the option “Only allow one response per person”. Note that users will be asked to log in to their Google Account to view and complete the form, but the actual user name will not be recorded.

I don’t want to force users to have a Google account, is there an alternative?

If you do not want to force your users to have a Google account, an alternative is to use pre-populate the form.

For example, here are links to pre-populate the field “name” in a sample survey:

• https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeC8fIptm9xY8Ai1dADB8JxqbzDbQFv4vULOq_vGCK10NWsUw/viewform?entry.1000000=Fabian
• https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeC8fIptm9xY8Ai1dADB8JxqbzDbQFv4vULOq_vGCK10NWsUw/viewform?entry.1000000=Caroline

You will notice that the URL changes at the end with an additional parameter. Only one field is pre-populated, but it is very easy to pre-populate several fields (such as name or email). Generate the link from the menu to get the syntax of the parameters and then you can manually change them before sending the link. If you have many links to send, it will take you some time, but it will work.

However, note that it does not prevent the person to modify the pre-populated information (directly from the form, or by changing the URL) or submit the survey multiple times.

It is not possible to hide fields, but there is a workaround! You can add fields you want to hide on a specific section of your form that will never be displayed. You have to use sections in your form and change the navigation to never show the section that contains the hidden fields and go to the next one directly. Read pages Add content to your form to know how to add a section and especially this page Control navigation to sections of a form.
Again, this will not prevent the user to manually change the URL, but many will not pay attention, especially if you use a URL shortener tool.

Is it possible to include the form in my website?

Yes, it is possible to include the form in your website as an iFrame. The option is available from the “File” menu. The menu generates an HTML code snippet that you can then copy / paste into a page of your site. You can also write the code manually, for example:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1SEu1y1TvOyPUwkUHcwgC-ky0LIVZXCjjr5ARH_E3mK0/viewform?embedded=true" width="760" height="500" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>

You can change the size of the iFrame and the URL to fit your form.

Is it possible to include the form directly in an email?

Yes, it is possible. When sending the email (via the “Send form” menu), make sure the checkbox “Include form in email” is checked.

I would like to get the IP address of each participant. Is it possible?

No, it is not possible to trace the IP address. You can force the users to authenticate before they can respond to the form, but this requires users to log in with their Google Account.

Is it possible to change the answers after having submitted the form?

When building the form, there is an option on the confirmation page settings, “Edit their response: Allows respondents to change their answers to your form”. If this option is checked, after submitting the form the person will have the confirmation page with a unique link to edit his / her answers. This link is displayed only one time, if the person closes the window, he / she will no longer be able to change his / her answers. You can find more information on the official documentation Send your form to respondents.

Is there a maximum number of responses?

There is no particular limit. However, a spreadsheet has a limit of 2 million cells.

Is it possible to redirect the users to another site once the form is submitted?

No, that’s not possible. A good idea may be to change the confirmation page message at the end of your form. Instead of the classic “Your response has been recorded”, replace with another sentence inviting the user to click on a link to continue.

Is it possible to not accept new responses after a specific date?

There is no such feature. But nothing prevents you from adding a free text section at the top of the form to indicate that it will be available until yyyy-mm-dd. And on that date, you close the form. This will have the same effect.

To prevent new answers to be submitted, click the Accepting responses in the toolbar. The button will show “The answers are no longer accepted” To reactivate it, click the button again.
When a form is no longer accepting response, users who visit are informed by a message that their answers will not be collected. To customize this message, change the text that appears under the title “The form has been disabled” in the top of the form.

Is it possible to create a multilingual survey?

It is not possible, but there are some workarounds that can more or less suit your needs.

You can create different forms, the link will be different, so as the summary of responses. It will be impossible to merge the results automatically, you will have to rework the table of responses with a spreadsheet tool like Excel (to consolidate the responses).

You can also add a first question that asks the user his/her language, then you can display the relevant sections in the selected language. Compare to the first solution, the link will be identical for everyone (no risk of error). The downside is that the question in French and the one in English will be on different columns (one cell will be always empty), so the summary of responses won’t match your expectations. Again, you will have to consolidate the responses manually.

Is it possible that a person starts to respond to a form and wants to resume it later?

No, that’s not possible. All responses are recorded once when submitting the form.

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Google is part of our daily lives

Countless news reports are chronicling the hegemony of the US firm. Google’s success fascinates, irritates and sometimes scares. Like most Internet users, it is difficult to spend a day without using one of the services provided by Google. At some point, you ever :

• Browsed the web with Google Chrome
• Searched the Internet with Google Web Search
• Read your emails with Gmail
• Organized your appointments with Google Calendar
• Managed your photo albums with Picasa
• Chatted with your friends with Google+ or Google Hangouts
• Watched videos with YouTube
• Read books with Google Books
• Managed your documents with Google Docs
• Translated an article with Google Translate
• Planed your moves with Google Maps
• Managed your phone, contacts or alarm clock (and more) with Android
• And even more…

The giant has diversified and is now competing on all fronts (automation, robotics, automotive…). Its strategy is still focusing on individuals and how to improve everyday life. You can read this list of mergers and acquisitions by Google to convince yourself.

One search may hide another

Did you know that Google is gathering and storing all your searches? Google is able to time travel in your search history, to the nearest second. The fact that you have searched for information on your future trip to Thailand on August 10th, 2005 at 10:05 may not be very useful to you, but this information among other represent a goldmine for Google, in order to establish your very detailed profile. It is however possible to disable this feature if you go to your account’s advanced settings. This is not something that an average user does. This is not a coincidence if this setting is enabled by default. A Google search may be trivial at first, but imagine that you’re looking for:

• Cars and brand comparison, Google will determine that you will change your car soon
• Fashion and clothing throughout the year, Google will determine that you are working in this sector
• A disease and related remedies, Google will determine that you have this disease
• Tips to save money, Google will determine that you are barely making ends meet at the end of the month

Jobs, places, favourite musics, movies, cooking, hobbies or political views. These examples are fairly simple, but it can goes very far when overlapping the information. It becomes possible to tell very accurately the events of a lifetime. If you think that Facebook is the biggest player, you’re probably wrong.

You’re the product

Google is continuously collecting huge amount of data from and about its users. It builds and consolidates complete profiles of our lives, and probably knows you better than your own mother or even yourself. Google’s services are free in exchange of your personal data. It is an implicit contract that you agreed (not necessarily read) when creating your account. The data collected can be sold and used for targeted marketing campaigns, statistics, etc. After all, it is fair game!

Smile, you’re on filter

The search engine displays a customized list of results, showing only the results that are relevant to your profile. You can do this simple experiment at home: run several searches with the same set of keywords but using different Google accounts. The list of results will probably be slightly different, especially if people are different (e.g. different gender or generation). The fact that the results are relevant to the connected user is a positive aspect, but it can also be a disadvantage. The primary purpose of the Internet is to make the universal knowledge accessible with a censorship as limited as possible. If you add an intelligent filtering system on your searches, there will be articles or even entire sections of the internet that you’ll never be aware of, simply because Google has decided so. Somehow, the knowledge and access to the information become limited or even incorrect.

I’m not anti-Google

Do not be mistaken, this article is not a pamphlet against Google. I am a very satisfied user for years and it will be probably painful to navigate the web without their services. This is more of a wakeup call. It is worth to spend some time to set up your account rather than letting Google decide for you. Unfortunately, I don’t know any magic tricks to continue using Google while preserving your privacy. However, I can advise you an alternative search engine DuckDuckGo. This search engine has gained great popularity by focusing on the respect of your privacy without neglecting the relevance of the results.