Google Forms Adds Progress Bar, Data Validation

Google Forms can be a useful way to conduct surveys and store the results in Google Drive. A series of new enhancements improve its capacity for that purpose, adding progress bars and simple data validation amongst other enhancements.

As the Google Enterprise Blog explains, four new features have been added:

  • Switching on the ‘Show progress bar at the bottom of form pages’ option under Form settings when creating a form will (surprise!) add a progress bar to live forms. This can help reduce drop-out rates from people who abandon forms before completing them.
  • Data validation lets you check whether data meets a set of defined conditions, including any regular expression. The ability to check if a text string is a valid email address seems particularly useful.
  • You can embed YouTube videos within a form. Google suggests this might be useful in training or classroom environments; I’d steer clear of it with customer surveys, since it’s just one more reason to abandon the form.
  • The ability to add a custom message to forms/surveys that have closed, explaining why they’re no longer available.

Four new ways to customize your Google Forms [Google Enterprise Blog]


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