Documents tower · floor

How to make a Google Form, and what it records about people

Building the thing takes five minutes. What decides whether how to make a google form ends well is two settings that sit outside the form editor — one controlling who can reach it, the other controlling what it writes down about them. Both have defaults, and on a work or school account the first default is stricter than the form looks.

That restriction is sensible inside a company and fatal outside one. A form built at work and sent to a supplier, a parent, a customer or a friend will simply refuse them — and the person who built it sees nothing wrong, because for them it opens perfectly. Test the link from an account that is not yours before sending it to anybody.

The second setting is the one people search for by its opposite: how to make a form anonymous. Google offers two ways of collecting an address, and they are not the same thing at all.

The confirmation line in the first card is the one worth quoting to somebody nervous about a form. With Verified, Google says the notice “displays on each page of the form” — not once at the start where it can be missed, but on every page. A respondent who reaches the end without noticing has been told several times.

And the honest reading of the second: an address typed into a box is an address somebody chose to type. It is required, which is not the same as correct. For a competition entry that matters; for a staff survey it may be exactly what you want, because it lets people give an address they are comfortable giving.

If you want neither — a genuinely anonymous form — the arrangement is the absence of both: collection off, and, on a work account, the organisation restriction off too, since a form that requires signing in has already identified everybody who opens it.

The fourth of those steps is the one that changes how a long form feels. A section is not a heading — Google is explicit that each one starts a new page. That is a decision about pacing rather than about layout: the same ten questions can arrive as one long page or as three shorter ones, and the person filling it in only ever sees the page they are on.

One last practical note about where the answers go. Google mentions almost in passing that an editor can change where responses are saved. That is worth knowing simply because it means the answers have a destination that is separate from the form itself — and if you have ever wondered whether replies still exist after a form was edited, that destination is the thing to go and look at.

The floors below take it four ways: who can open it, what it records, building it, and getting it in front of people.

What this tower will not do

It will not treat the form as finished when the questions are written. Two defaults decide who can answer and what is recorded, and neither is on the page you build.

It will not describe a form as anonymous while a sign-in is required. On a work account that requirement identifies everybody who opens it.

And it will not call adding a collaborator a way of sharing. Google says an editor can see the responses and change where they are saved. What holds instead is simple: the organisation default, the two ways of collecting addresses, the confirmation shown on each page and the editor’s access to responses are quoted from Google’s own documentation, listed below.