7 Best Google Forms add-ons

If you’re already familiar with G Suite, chances are you’ve tried Google Forms — whether to collect your own data or provide it to someone else. But unlike many of Google’s other tools, Google Forms is actually much more useful when you add on other features.

The great thing about add-ons is that they allow you to customize your Google Forms experience in a variety of ways. For instance, some add-ons work best for teachers, while others may work best for salespeople or small businesses. Real users in the Google community have created the  add-ons, which means many of them have already experienced similar pain points and have created work-arounds to solve them.

We’ll give you some recommendations for the best Google Forms add-ons to enhance your user experience. And if your overall experience with Google Forms has been lacking, you might want to check out Jotform as an alternative — it already offers many of the features below.

formLimiter

The formLimiter is a pretty essential feature, so you’ll want to add it to your Google Forms right away. This Google Forms add-on stops users from submitting forms once specified criteria have been met.

For example, if you’re selling a product and using Google Forms to take orders, you can use formLimiter to stop anyone from placing additional orders once you’ve received the maximum amount you can fulfill.

You could also use this add-on to handle time-specific restrictions. If you’re having a flash sale and won’t be offering your product after 11:59 p.m., you can set formLimiter to cut off your orders at that time.

Choice Eliminator 2

Choice Eliminator 2 is the perfect add-on if you’re hoping to pare down response choices. This can be especially helpful if you ask respondents to choose an option that you have in limited quantities.

For instance, say you’re asking donors to choose from a list of free gifts they can receive for donating to your cause. Once you run out of a specific item, you can easily remove that gift from the list without having to close out the entire form. This saves you a lot of future headaches — no more emailing respondents to ask them to resubmit the form with a new choice from the updated list.

Booking Calendar

If you’re using Google Forms to book meetings and appointments, the Booking Calendar add-on is a great tool for you. You can easily add events from your calendar as appointment choices, so when a respondent fills out a form, they can see which time slots are available. You get to set up the rules, which means you have the power to select which appointments show up in the form.

Doc Appender

The Doc Appender add-on can be especially useful for teachers. This tool allows you to take some or all of the data you’ve collected through your Google Form and automatically add it to a separate Google Doc.

This feature can be helpful for compiling data on each student throughout the school year, keeping it in easy-to-read documents that are unique to each student. It’s also helpful if you’re trying to get a good sense of how each student responded to a specific question on an evaluation form without sifting through all the other responses.

Just specify in the Doc Appender where you’d like the specific data to be recorded, and this document will update as responses come in.

Dynamic Fields

Dynamic Fields is the perfect add-on for those looking to incorporate data from an existing spreadsheet into their forms. This can be incredibly useful when your clients are booking event dates.

For example, let’s say you’ve set up your class schedule for next month in a Google Sheet and you’re collecting registrations for those classes. You can use the Dynamic Fields add-on to automatically add the dates from your spreadsheet as choices in your form.

And if you want to remove dates once they’ve hit the maximum number of students, you can use the Choice Eliminator 2 add-on described above to do that.

Certify’em

Certify’em is an awesome tool for teachers or administrators who are looking for an easy way to give students proof they’ve completed a course. With this add-on, you can use your Google Form as a certification exam, and when someone passes the test, they’ll get an official PDF certificate as an email attachment.

Each certificate comes with a unique serial number. You can create your own certificates, but if your design skills aren’t up to snuff, you can use one of the professionally designed templates that come with the add-on.

Plus, Certify’em keeps a record of everyone who passes the test (and anyone who doesn’t) in a built-in spreadsheet.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful tool on its own, but when you pair it with Google Forms, you gain more control over the data you collect.

Integrating Google Analytics into your form allows you to create custom calculations, unique dashboards with helpful visuals, and automatic reports to make sure you’re putting all that data you’re collecting to good use. Everything is compiled in an easy-to-read spreadsheet, so you won’t get too bogged down in data science — unless that’s your thing, of course!