How To Create Forms with Google Docs

Need to post an employment application or survey? Do it for free by creating a form in Google Docs and sending people to your form.

I was inspired to go through the steps of doing this after being directed to an employment application posted by a blogger that I follow. I went to their form and it looked great, but just out of curiosity I looked at the link and noticed it was hosted by google. I was shocked.

I used Google Docs for nearly all of my documenting needs. I create numerous documents and spreadsheets using Google Docs. I knew that they had a form creator, but I never really gave it a try, until now.

In order to go through this quick and dirty tutorial, you obviously need a google account and navigate to the Google Docs part of your account. If you are at your GMail, there will be a link to Documents at the top of your screen. Click that link and then you will be at the main screen for Google Docs.

Now that you are in Google Docs, click Create New and select "Form"

When our form is initially created, we have several fields available to us. There is a field where we can enter the title of the form, this is the field with the text "Untitled form" in it. Another field where we can enter a description for the form, this is the field that has the text "You can include any text of info that will help people fill this out" in it. There is also one custom form field created, which has the Question Title filled out as "Sample Question 1" and is highlighted with a faded yellow background.

Just to be quick, I'm just going to create a very standard contact form for this example. The title of my form is going to be "Contact Us" and I will just enter some lorem text in the description.

This first form field is already available to us as "Sample Question 1," but I'm going to change that to be a name field. To do that, I'm changing the Question Title to "Name" and clicking the checkbox "Make this a required question," then clicking done.

To add additional form fields, click on the "Add Item" button in the top left part of your screen. Then select which type of question you want. For this exampe, I'll create the final question in my form, which is "Comment/Question"." To do this, I need to select "paragraph text" as my question type. This is a standard textbox field so I don't need to make any adjustments before clicking "Done".

To change the theme of your form, click on the "Theme" button right next to the "Add Item" button. This will bring up a window where you can select from several different themes for your form.

After you have all your questions created and a form theme selected, you can view your form at anytime by clicking on the link at the bottom of your admin screen. Have fun, and I hope you enjoy using yet another great tool from Google.