My 7 days with Google Apps : Day 1

Day 1: Google-ing Google Docs

I truly don't remember when I started to use Gmail as my first Google-based product.At the first glance, Gmail seems ugly to me.I'm more familiar with yahoo mail and everything in yahoo look trendy(Mind you I started using yahoo mail at the age of 14 back in 1999).

But now, after I received a task at the office to distribute a survey within 15-30 minutes, gosh, I had no choice but Google-ing the best possible solutions around.I encountered various sites of online survey but none can cater the need which is-yeah u guess it right, FREE survey form that can be distributed without compromising the number of respondents allowed at one particular time.

I'm truly grateful and somehow relieve that I chose Google Docs with form capability to distribute my survey at that time.To my surprise, it worked just fine and very easy to use.After I did a few simple tests among my colleagues, I launched the survey immediately.

The  feedback from users are easily gathered and in fact, the form is still online till now.However, there are a few drawbacks to the form; since it is intended to leverage the capability of spreadsheets, the form implementations are quite, how should I say, need to be improvised again.


I must say the form is functioning as it claims but if the form should cater wider respondent category using extensively jumping through and within form sections, I personally do not recommend this as your survey platform.You can opt for other open source survey program that is available for download and deploy.Otherwise, you may use it as you wish since it is simple and fast to distribute.


As a few of you may notice, the data will get populated into the spreadsheet whenever a user submit a form.Sadly, if I edit my form for example I edit multiple choices options label in the form, the related spreadsheet cell of  an existing respond remains the same(I shall explain it in details on my next post).


Google also added some new features back then to enhance the form capability to let the non-related respondent to skip questions by using page break and section header.These add-on will then create paging capability in that form.


You can also add Google gadgets to include graphs,charts, gauges and many more in your spreadsheet. These definitely a very helpful tool when you need to analyze your data.However, please bear in mind your data should be presented in a right format to let the tool read it for you.Otherwise, you are just barking at the wrong tree.


So what do I like best in this Google product?


Well, I guess it is because the mobile capability it offers where you can access your spreadsheet almost everywhere as long as you have the internet connection, of course.You can also invite your friends to be your collaborators and let them edit and access the spreadsheet for you if you need their input as well.


Forms, gadgets, mobility and collaborate these are the key points that will make it a huge phenomenon(just my personal opinion!) in these upcoming years.Opps, I forgot!Save the best part for the last, did I mention that it's FREE?I think, I did.Twice!