mguhlin

Google Forms and Sheets: A Magical Solution

Earlier this week, I received a question via email I had to spend a moment thinking about. There are so many ways to answer technical questions, depending on what solution or ecosystem you work in. I’m grateful that Google Forms and Sheets with their host of amazing add-ons are available. It saves me from having to try to figure out MySQL and PHP pages that can save, pull, and share data from their storage.

 

The Question

Here’s the question, revised for simplicity.

I need a way to curate the questions sent by the campus staff. Their supervisor needs to be able to see all the questions and answers. Answers made to the campus staff must be reviewed PRIOR to being posted.

I wanted a way that we didn’t have to email/chat her every time we have a question. In that way,it’s something we can all reference. It is something we can use to check to see if a question has already been answered. 

I floated the idea of a Google Sheet and including a column that would have “topic” or having a separate sheet per topic for organizational purposes. She was afraid this might not be efficient as the tabs can start to get overwhelming.

Do you have any ideas that might work out?

My Response

What an intriguing problem.

PLANNING IT OUT

My suggestion for these types of questions is to draw the form you want to use to collect information, the reports you want to see and interact with. You’re essentially designing the interface and inputs on paper. Another benefit is that if you have the supervisor do this with you, they are invested in the solution.

IMPLEMENTATION IDEAS

While an online database (e.g. MySQL, Database web site) would be helpful, we’re limited by the tools we have available. I would use four components using Google Sheets.:
  • Google Form to collect information and feed it to a form response.
  • Form Response to hold raw data. You and others can update the form response to show status of request, action taken, etc. Remember, you can set up the same form with different pre-filled answers to help the person asking question.
  • Summary page to pull the data from the form response sheet tab to another page that is easier for the supervisor to check. The super doesn’t need to see all the data, only a summary of what’s relevant. Turn on notifications for an edits to the Summary page. The supervisor will have to turn those on when s/he logs in.
  • Report. Create an Autocrat PDF report (a mail merge so to speak) that you can run periodically and organizes the data in an easy to process format. You can have it email key staff when run, or save a file to a shared Google Drive directory.

Of course, the next step is to put this into place. I may do that in time for my Google session at TCEA’s Google Summer Camp 2022 event, taking place in June, 2022. 

In the meantime, anyone have thoughts about this?

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

Discover more from Another Think Coming

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Leave a comment