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Google Forms

I've used Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Photos, and Hangouts, but I haven't had the opportunity to use Forms so this week I am going to tackle this versatile Google tool. Google Forms is part of Google's online apps suite of tools that allow you to save, manipulate, and analyze data using version control in your browser. This is amazing for collaboration but can be helpful to individuals too. Forms is essentially a sidekick to Sheets, allowing you to make excellent forms in a matter of minutes.

For this post, I decided to create a test Form for students. I work at Lewis-Clark State College in the Registrar's Office. We have many, many paper forms that students have to print or pick up, fill out, and return. Then we process them, scan them, link them to the student, and store them electronically. It's an improvement on manual filing and paper documents but it's still not totally efficient. We use Google Suite for our students' LCMail accounts, so we have access to Forms and the other tools through secure LCMail accounts. It thought Forms might be a potential alternative for students who don't want to fill out paper forms and would rather request changes electronically.

I created a test Form for student address changes. The student logs into their secure LCMail account through Gmail and selects the address change form from the Google Drive Registrar Documents folder. They answer the questions on the form and share it with the Registrar's Office. We receive an email stating that a student has submitted an address change and we export the form data to an Excel spreadsheet. The form is processed as usual, but with no paper to deal with! It's still in early testing stages, but I think it might be a great use for Google Forms.

The ebook chapter on Google Forms is very informative, but I really recommend exploring some of the links the author included at the end of their chapter. There are a lot of great little hacks and tricks that make Google Forms work even harder for you. What other unique ways could Google Forms help you?

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