Google Forms – Managing your form’s responses

Once you’ve made your form and shared it, you’ll then want to see the responses and probably want to have a visual summary of them. Google Forms provides a wonderful graphical summary of the responses automatically right within Forms itself, so there’s no need to create charts yourself.

Open your form and you’ll be in the form editor. There are two main parts to the editor, the questions and the responses. Click on “Responses”. Here it will tell you how many responses you’ve received and gives you the option of seeing a summary of them, seeing a summary per question, or seeing the individual responses.

We’ll use a post-event questionnaire as an example.

Viewing a summary of the responses

Click on “Summary”. Here you’ll see all the typed in responses and for questions where there were limited options, you’ll see a graph.

In this question, I can quickly see how many people had attended the event for the first time.

This one was a Checkbox question and I can quickly see the most popular sessions at this event.

This question was a linear-scale question. Here I can see that our customers are happy.

This question was a multiple-choice grid and within one graph can show a lot of information. In this case, we asked them to rate the speakers on a set of criteria.

With date and time questions, Forms will put the date or time entered along with the number of people who entered it, so you can see the most popular one.

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Viewing responses by question

You can also see a summary of the responses grouped by question. Click on “Question” to do this.

You have the choice of clicking through the questions one by one using the arrows on the right, or you can go to a particular question using the drop down menu on the left.

In this revision test I can see the answers my students have entered and see that lots got the answer wrong and selected London. So, I quickly know that we need to cover this in class.

For multi-choice and checkbox questions, you also have the option to view the options that were available for that question.

Viewing individual responses

If you want to see what a specific person filled out on your form, click on “Individual”. You can flick through the responses by clicking on the arrows next to where it says. e.g. “1 of 13”.

This shows you exactly what the form-filler completed. It also gives you the option of deleting a response, by clicking on the bin icon on the right.

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Back to the top of the page, there are some further options that you can change.

On the right, you can switch off “Accepting responses”, which means that no-one can submit more responses using your form. If they open the form they will get a message saying this form is no longer accepting responses.

When you create a form, you can link a spreadsheet to it, so that the responses are stored in a place other than within Forms. Either click on the green spreadsheet icon or the 3 dots and click on “Select responses destination”.

You then have the choice of creating a new spreadsheet (and naming it) or adding a new page to an existing spreadsheet. If you want a new one, just click “Create”. If you want it to add to an existing one, click “Select existing spreadsheet”.

Clicking the second option, opens up a dialogue box where you can choose the spreadsheet you want by clicking on it, then click “Select”.

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If you’ve already set up a spreadsheet, clicking on the green spreadsheet icon will open the spreadsheet where the responses appear and live.

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There are also some other useful options by clicking on the 3 dots.

Get email notifications for new responses – By selecting this, Forms will send you an email every time someone fills out and submits your form.

Unlink form – Choose this if you want to disconnect a spreadsheet from a form.

Download responses (.csv) – This downloads the responses in .csv format which can be useful for uploading the data to another application.

Delete all responses – Sometimes you want to use your form with a different set of people, e.g. a new class, but you don’t want to mix the old and new responses. So, here you can delete all the responses from the form. Note, this deletes them from the form but those already collected in the spreadsheet remain.

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