Just Want a Simple Form Submission to Email

[seekingformemai]

Hi. I set up a Google Form. I want the information people fill out to be emailed to me. The closest I could come to that was being sent an email notification that looks like this.

I don't want it to email me a notification with a button. I just want the filled out form info to be sent. To make matters worse, when I click the button/link in that email, I can’t just see the form information that someone filled out. It gives me a comprehensive history of every piece of data that everyone ever filled out. After 10 form submissions, it’s going to be a huge mess to count down every list and figure out which answers go with other answers.

Is there a simple way just to get a simple email sent that gives me the form information each time someone fills it out? Like Zoho Forms does? Thanks.

[PriyaC]

Hi,

There's a number of marketplace add-ons that extend Forms properties, including ability to see details in an email: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/category/works-with-form. I don't use these though so can't provide a recommendation for any particular app - hopefully someone else in the community can. 

Regarding seeing the answers once you click through - to see one person's response, click on the Individual tab. This will show you what one person has entered and you can use the arrows to tab between different people's entries.

Alternatively, if you've set the form up to send responses to a Google Sheet then you can see individual responses by row in that sheet.

[icrew]

+1 to what @PriyaC mentioned. The only thing to add is that you can also configure Sheets to notify you when a new response comes in--see https://support.google.com/docs/answer/91588

[Lauren_vdv]

Good call @icrew!

I usually make sure that the "Get email notifications for new responses" is selected (as mentioned in the original post)

and then when a new response/email comes in, I can go to the Sheet and see the latest response in the Sheet. I usually prefer viewing all the responses in the Sheet, rather than in the form view.

[seekingformemai]

Thanks. These are all good insights. Because I just want a clean, easy, and simple solution (I'm not a computer programmer or IT professional) without complicating things (I already have workflow automations to keep up with), I am going to use Zoho Forms. Zoho Forms is really intuitive with everything built in. I prefer Google over Zoho as a company but Google Forms is just no match for the clean simplicity and pragmatism of Zoho Forms. 

[icrew]

If Zoho forms is a better fit, then yes, definitely use that! 

If you have ideas for how Google forms might be improved, you might want to post those to the Feature Ideas section here. See https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Feature-Ideas/gh-p/workspace-ideas-group, and https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/custom/page/page-id/Workspace-Feature-Ideas-FAQ for how to get access. This will allow it to be upvoted by others and possibly considered as a future feature enhancement.

If you are submitting a feature idea, be sure to explain the problem that you're trying to solve with the feature idea, not just the idea itself. For example, saying "when my users are trying to do 'A', they often get confused by the fact that the buttons to do 'X' and to do 'Y' look quite similar to each other, which leads to this unintended consequence" is far more likely to get fixed than a feature idea that just says "change the color of the button 'Y'".

Cheers,

Ian