Saturday, May 17, 2008

One of the cooler features on Google Spreadsheets

One of the features on Google spreadsheets that has saved me a lot of time recently has been the ability to create a quick web form based on a spreadsheet template to collect information from end users. The use cases are endless for this type of tool are endless. For example, how often do you send an e-mail out to people asking for feedback or trying to determine a convenient time for people to get togethers, or ask people to provide comment to your blog post. The problem with e-mail replies or blog posts is the data is unstructured and the owner of the post needs to structure the information manually and make sense of it. With the web form capability in spreadsheets, the analyzer of the data creates a quick webform and can review the data whenever he/she wants.

If you want to play with it login to google docs, and create a spreadsheet with a few columns. Click on the share tab and you'll notice a new option to "Invite people to fill out a form". I have attached a few screenshots on how things look:


No comments: