If you are a long time user of Google’s free web app alternatives to Microsoft’s Office suite, or if you’re thinking about making the switch, then you might be interested in an update to the company’s Forms app. Forms allows you to create surveys and polls for your friends quickly and easily. Google has announced that it will allow developers to introduce add-ons to Forms that will add extra functionality to the app. Google’s Docs (equivalent to Microsoft Word) and Sheets (Google’s version of Microsoft Excel) web apps have had this ability for a while now. There are already add-ons available for Forms and these are some of the most useful that Google has chosen to highlight: formLimiter: Close your survey automatically, after a maximum number of responses is reached, or at a date and time of your choosing. The Ultradox Trigger: here you can create custom emails, reports, invoices, newsletters, etc., based on information that people enter into your form. Finally, the Form Values: This allows you to store and pull from lists that you use regularly in Forms, such as a list of staff, students, rooms, and resources.
Google has also suggested a number of useful features that possible ad-ons could provide. These include setting a survey end date, ending custom emails based on responses and storing lists of choices that you frequently add to questions. There will likely be many more add-ons released in the coming weeks and months. There have already been a whole host of new updates to Forms in the past few months, such as new theme choices and the ability to customize your own theme by adding photos, logos, changing the font and its color and picking a different background.
Other current features in Google’s Forms app include the ability to add an unlimited number of recipients to your survey or poll (either through a URL, a form embedded in an email or by adding it to a website), access to real-time response information so you can carry out some basic analysis, and a tool to automatically collect and organize responses in Google’s Sheets app. You can also add your friends and family to your survey so they can help you create it and collate the responses.