Google Forms is a pretty cool feature. You can setup an external form, that allows you to collect information from customers, friends or family and then add that data to a spreadsheet. So, for example you can have your customers visit your form and submit their address and contact information. That information would be collected and stored in Drive via a pre-organized spreadsheet.
The service works well, except for one blaring issue.
It’s been a long time coming but forms created through Google Drive can now properly collect date and time information. For some unknown and rather odd reason, the structured fields were never an option in the past. Before, if you asked someone a date related question like, “when is your birthday” or “when is your anniversary” the answer was never structured properly.
Now, you can specifically set the question type to display in either date or time formats, and the form itself will reflect as much. Needless to say, this update makes Google Forms a lot more useful than they used to be. Google made the announcement about the new feature via Google+, where they also showed off the new date and time support in action.
Now when someone is filling out a form and submitted a date, they’ll see a proper calendar entry field instead of just a plain text field. The information will actually remain structured on the backend as well, so that anyone extracting data from the spreadsheets will have a slightly easier job. Now they don’t have to translate any mumble jumble from a semi-working contact form.
Up until this point, Google Forms have been nearly useless because this feature was missing. Okay, maybe that’s pushing it a little too far, but not being able to correctly record dates and times is a pretty big deal. It’s nice to see Google supporting Forms and Drive with features like this, but just a quick look at the Google+ feeds and you’ll see users demanding tons of other features too. Google certainly has their work cut out for them when it comes to optimizing the Drive applications and adding new features.
Have you tried out the new forms yet? What do you think of them?
Source: Google