If you use Google Forms your data goes into a spreadsheet. Whether you are using Google Forms or are starting straight from a spreadsheet there are some great spreadsheet Add-Ons that can increase your productivity.

What is an Add-On?

An Add-On is, typically, not created by Google but rather 3rd party programmers. These scripts add extra functionality to your Google Sheets spreadsheets. You can search for and add Add-Ons from the “Add-on” menu in Google Sheets. Here are some of the Add-Ons I have installed.

AutoCrat

Anything by Andrew Stillman is going to be good. His Autocrat Add-On script is one of my favorites. It allows you to merge your Google Forms data (or spreadsheet information) to a Google Doc. Even better, the merge can be triggered by submitting a Google Form. This launches a side panel that walks you through the steps to set up the merge. 

rowCall

The Add-On script rowCall takes your Google Form data and filters it into tabs. For example, if you have a Google Form that collects homeroom teacher name. A tab will be created for each homeroom teacher and only the students with that home room teacher will appear on that tab. If you have ever wanted to apply multiple filters to sort information onto their own sheet, try out this Add-On.

UPDATE: rowCall add-on is no longer available. Use toTabs add-on instead.

Crop Sheet

By default a sheet in Google Sheets has 26 columns and 1000 rows. Sometimes it is nice to make a smaller sheet. Enter in your information to your spreadsheet. Using the Add-On Crop Sheet, the extra rows and columns are eliminated. You can always add more rows and columns but this really helps clean up your sheets.

I created some scripts that will create a lot of tabs at once (https://alicekeeler.com/templatetab). There is a 200 tab limit in Google Sheets and a 2 million cell limit. You will not be able to have 200 tabs if you have the 26 x 1000 grid for the sheets. Cropping the sheet before duplicating sheets will reduce the number of cells in the spreadsheet which helps.