Google Forms vs. Google Sheets

Appropriate Scenarios

• Data collection
• Formative assessment
• Survey/questionnaire
• File uploads (Can be limited to particular sizes or file types).

Inappropriate Scenarios

• Lessons where you need instant feedback to answers rather than waiting for the whole form to be completed.
• File Uploads where not all of the users have Google accounts.

Incentivized

Google Sheets is perfectly suited for collaborative documentation, it's been really easy for us in situations like cost tracking, permission matrix etc, where no complex third party tools needs to be setup! Just sign in with your google account, and start doing effortless work. But keep in mind about it's performance, it's not so suitable for thousands of rows worth of data as it will start to become sluggish.

Incentivized

• Capture of information from clients and/or consultants for real-time analysis.
• Knowledge evaluation for our work team, the predefined templates allow the creation of tests and knowledge tests that are very didactic and easy to grade.
• The acquired data is cleanly integrated with google spreadsheets allowing for fast and accurate analysis.
• The form completion notifications are customizable and do their job well.

Incentivized

• It is a great way to collaborate in real-time with any member across the organization.
• It easy very easy to create formulas, data validation options, and pivot tables for data analysis.
• It is a great way to see the revision history and changes that other collaborators have made on the document.

• Edit view limits the questions as seen by viewers. The view function is nice to toggle between to see what the question will look like, but the edit view of some questions (like checkboxes) is confusing for the editor.
• It would be wonderful to be able to assign responses to go to specific users. The user needs to go into the responses section and select the option to receive notifications, versus the owner of the form being able to do that.
• Having a dependency feature for questions (in addition to sections) would be very helpful, so that if a question is answered a certain way, another question appears.

Incentivized

• Pivot tables are different but could be improved upon; sort, totals, filters
• When entering negative numbers as the first in a formula you need to remember to "+-100+25" instead of "-100+25"
• The power of the internet of course makes it easy to find solution, but the help function is not easily available
• Color coding changes on the cell, but there is not an easy way to click on a cell and use the selected color; like excel

Incentivized

Google Forms comes with the rest of the GSuite, so we don't need to renew our access to it specifically. It's nice to have it as an option if we need it, but it's really not professional enough for externally facing surveys at the company I work for now. However, nothing beats it for quick internal polls at a company that uses Google Workspace.

Incentivized

I am not involved in the purchase/selection process, but my organization is a Google shop, and Sheets meets most of our spreadsheet needs and works seamlessly with our other tools. I don't anticipate our switching anytime soon.

Incentivized

Overall ease of use for staff, volunteers, and adult learners, and easy to get reports and to share reports via Sheets. As a free tool, it does more than expected. Easy to change the look and brand it to your organization, or just make it more fun, depending on what you want to use it for.

Incentivized

It can easily handle most uses and functions. It is only for very large datasets or advanced analysis that it either lacks the proper functions or performance begins to slow. Most employees who continue to use competitors' products do so out of preference, familiarity with the user interface, or other surface-level reasons.

Incentivized

In the years I've used GoogleForms I've never ran into any issues with the reliability or availability. Google is a gigantic company with essentially limitless resources which makes it very easy to trust that I will continue to be able to enjoy the same reliability I've come to know and expect from GoogleForms

Incentivized

Like most Google products, Google Sheets rarely has outages or slowness, and when it does, connection is always momentarily restored. I can't recall a time when I've been unable to access Google Sheets but able to access other sites just fine. That said, errors aren't uncommon when handling large data volume. You know what they say about using spreadsheets as databases, but sometimes it's just the most convenient option, especially for smaller or one-off projects, and not being able to store large amounts of data hampers our ability to move quickly with scrappy prototypes or full solutions. It would be great if we could better integrate our data manipulation (Apps Script) with big data in the sheet.

Incentivized

One of the things that comes as a benefit of the lack to create complex logic branching and truly custom design is that there isn't lot of room to bog down the software. GoogleForms has always loaded just as fast as my internet service and device would allow it. I'm not sure about front end integrations or integrations into the form itself, as I've never explored it, but on the backend, I've never had any issues with integrations channeling from GoogleForms from the GoogleForms's end of things.

Incentivized

Again, Google Sheets is no exception to Google's general high speed and reliability, but load times can be slow for larger amounts of data. I've used Sheets with Zapier and have used the Python API, and speed has never been an issue.

Incentivized

Google has a support team but it isn't the most helpful with Forms. I find most of my answers by searching online and watching tutorial videos. I would recommend utilizing online resources before contacting their live support team for help. Just make sure that they are recent videos or directions. Google is constantly updating their interfaces so it is easy for things to get out of date

Incentivized

I have never contacted Google Sheets support, but Google Sheets makes it very easy to report an issue or suggest a feature from Sheets itself (Help > Help Sheets improve), and I've had mostly good experiences with support for other Google products.

Incentivized

Google Forms doesn't really require "implementation": simply log into GDrive and create a survey! You can configure settings per survey to, for example, automatically write responses to a GSheet.

Incentivized

Google Forms is easy to use and affordable. The biggest benefit, however, is that our organization already uses other Google products heavily. Because of this Google Forms was our top choice. Some smaller departments in our organization still use other solutions, such as SurveyMonkey, but as a whole it has been helpful to standardize on a single product.

Incentivized

Microsoft Excel in terms of singular user continues to be the best one in my opinion, but for collaboration I don't agree in that position, Google Sheets are better. Libre Office and WPS Office unfortunately are far away from the quality of Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, they are good solutions if you don't want to trust the data on external services, other than that they are not good.

GoogleForms lacks the ability for complex logic branching and the ability to truly design it in a custom manner. It's pretty obvious when you land on a GoogleForm that it is in fact a GoogleForm. This rating solely reflects the lack of flexibility which in turn makes it something that wouldn't usually be scaled. That being said, if needing to scale a simple solution, GoogleForms would be up for the job.

Incentivized

Google Sheets works very well with multiple users. It's convenient to see in real-time who is collaborating in a sheet, down to the specific cell that they're viewing/editing. Linking Sheets across departments is convenient with the IMPORTRANGE function.

Incentivized

• Google Forms provides us a vehicle to gauge faculty and student response to our online courses and their features in real time so that we can keep our courses updated for students and faculty who facilitate them.
• Since Google is free, provides storage space, and provides Shared Drives (at least in our institutional account), using Google Forms helps us manage our data. We support over 400 courses with thousands of sections so Google Forms helps us manage the data coming out of these courses, mostly student and faculty feedback about what is working and what is not.
• We encourage our faculty to use Google Forms to survey their students for prior knowledge, for interest inventories, and the like. It's incredibly nimble and useful for collecting data quickly and presenting results in easy-to-understand charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Client outreach; it has helped me make a list of customers to reach out to.
• Accounting; it has made accounting SO much easier and smoother, so I have more time to focus on clients and projects.
• Cost formulas - it's allowed me to make comfortable margins with fair customer pricing by making breakeven formula sheets.

Incentivized