How to password protect a Google Form

Password protecting your form can be useful. Password protection isn’t just for security — it can also help provide cleaner results. For example, if you want results only from a certain demographic or any other preselected group of people, password protection is the way to go.

Searching for a simple setting

You would probably head straight to the settings of your form builder to set up password protection.

But if you dig through the dropdowns in Google Forms, you won’t see an option to enable a password.

Google Forms is one of the most popular form tools because, hey, it’s Google. The problem is that Forms isn’t a core product and doesn’t get as much love as many of Google’s other products.

Although it’s not a perfect fit, there’s one option that can help control who fills out your form.

Limiting responses

Under the Responses dropdown, there’s a setting that restricts individuals to filling out the form once. If that’s what you’re really seeking, this feature might be better than password protection.

Limiting form respondents to just one response will require them to sign into Google before they can fill out your form. But that’s probably not really what you’re looking for.

After limiting responses, you can add an element to your form that will collect emails. From there, you can manually filter out unwanted emails from unknown people. Still, there’s got to be a better way.

Using a handy workaround

Fortunately, there’s a hack that’s not too kludgy. You can create a special field to collect the password and then redirect the respondent to a separate page that they couldn’t otherwise reach.

Start by adding a question to the beginning of your form. Make sure it’s a Short answer question.

Now click the three dots in the lower right corner and choose Response validation.

Fill out the question to look like the above. We’re using regular expressions instead of plain text because there’s no option to check whether text matches the entry.

Regular expressions can get complicated, but we don’t need to worry about that since we just want a simple match. Don’t forget to set the question as Required.

The next step is to limit access to the rest of the document.

You can do that by clicking on Add section in the hover menu next to the question.

Now that you’ve divided the form into sections, visitors will see only the current section; the rest will be hidden. They won’t be able to leave the first section until they’ve entered the correct password. 

But you’re probably still thinking there must be a better way.

Thinking outside of the box

As mentioned, people flock to Google Forms because it’s a Google product. The thing is, Google originally created Forms to beef up Google Sheets. It only became a standalone product after it got popular.

But it’s not a full-featured product that can meet the expectations of a modern user. If you want all the bells and whistles, it’s better to use something that was built from the ground up to be a competitive and feature-rich form tool.

One such tool is Jotform, which includes a best-in-class form builder and several other tools that support it seamlessly. And it’s the most feature-rich form editor, so of course, it has a setting to password protect your forms. There are many other security and access control features as well. It’s free to get started and well worth checking out.