Google Forms Workaround

I saw someone post a question about how to upload a list of say, 100, names to a Google form for a drop down list. I am not aware of a way to do this, but this was my suggested work around.

The other day I posted a blog post on 5 easy steps to pre-populate fields in a Google form. By apending &entry_0=blah+blah+blah to the end of a Google form URL you can have the form pre fill out information.  Then you can direct your users to a webpage with a link for each person rather than sending them to the form itself.

If you have the list of names in a spreadsheet you can use the ampersand (&) symbol to concatenate the Google forms URL with the persons name.

Start with the list of names

Use the =split(A3,” “) function to separate the name at the space if you do not already have the names in separate columns. (Remember you can NOT have spaces in your URL’s).

In the next column start a text string with =”

Take the URL of your Google Form

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dGJZNFV5Yk5UQXBiQURZUTVwOVRuVEE6MQ#gid=1

(Notice that the end of this form has a #gid=1 after the form key… delete that!)

=”https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dGJZNFV5Yk5UQXBiQURZUTVwOVRuVEE6MQ

If the persons name you want is in the 1st field it is actually field zero so you would add to the end of the URL &entry_0=

=”https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dGJZNFV5Yk5UQXBiQURZUTVwOVRuVEE6MQ&entry_0=

Concatenate the cells that contain the persons name.

=”https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dGJZNFV5Yk5UQXBiQURZUTVwOVRuVEE6MQ&entry_0=”&B3&”+”&C3

Notice you need to end the quotations and add an ampersand (&) at the end of the text string to add it to the cell B3.  You will need a plus sign to have a space bar show up in your form, since that is text it will need to be surrounded by quotations. Concatenating that with C3 will require another ampersand (&).

Now you have a unique URL for that name.

Drag the corner down and create a unique URL for each of the other names.

Create a webpage that lists each URL next to the name (or at least a link to) and let users who will be filling out the form choose the URL that corresponds to the person they are choosing from the list.