Google Forms won't read my mind

June 10, 2015 1:15 PM

I have set up a Google registration form for a monthly event, where attendees sign up any time and are then confirmed for the next open event. I like to mess around with the order of form submissions and add notes and colour-coding, but Google Forms/Sheets doesn't like this and messes up the order.

A colleague created the original form and then I tweaked it to suit her more specific needs. I also started a new sheet for submissions from that point on, and pasted in the relevant data from the old sheet. We then made further changes to the form which added extra columns, which is nothing surprising or new.

If we confirm attendees for an event and they don't show up, I want to cut/paste them down the list to the next "block" for the next event. I also added some columns for notes/comments, and I colour-code rows for no-shows. All this means it's very different from the original form.

Now when a user submits a form, even though there are already 30-40 rows of data, the new submission turns up at around Row 6.

Why doesn't Google Forms place the newest data at the first blank row? And is there a way to make it behave?

posted by tracicle to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

it might take some tinkering to confirm this, but I think it goes down the sheet until it finds a blank in the "Timestamp" field and inserts the form submission there. Have you tried copying in dummy timestamps into the existing records?
posted by clockwork at 2:03 PM on June 10, 2015

Oh yeah Google Forms with Sheets can be really fussy. It gets really upset when you try to play with the spreadsheet.

You might want to look into a more thought-out form system, like Wufoo or Typeform.
posted by radioamy at 5:13 PM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Or honestly, keep one Sheet for the responses as they come in, then copy/paste them into another Sheet and manipulate them there.
posted by radioamy at 5:13 PM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: radioamy, that sounds like the simplest solution.

I'll try the dummy timestamp idea too -- it sounds like something that could work.

I'm keen to stick with Google Forms for the sake of streamlining/consistency. Everything I use right now is GDrive-based.

Thanks to both of you for those answers!
posted by tracicle at 1:35 AM on June 12, 2015