Thursday, December 1, 2011

Email Mail Merge: Creating a Google Form

In this series of posts, I am going to detail how you could create and send personalized emails from data collected in a Form.
The first thing that you need to do is create a Form in Google Docs.





















I like to have the questions in the Form be the information I am collecting. For example, I use First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Gender for all of my forms. I need this information to create my personalized email messages.
Now, the next questions I create in my form are the items that I want to assess. I put the skills in there and I will then have a measure for each skill when I enter the data in the form. (I also put a description of the shortcut I would like to use as the help text for the questions).
This finishes the form (you may add as many skills in as you want to assess as additional questions). I believe that Google Forms are great as a standalone tool to collect data, but the real strength comes from the spreadsheet that gets populated from the submitted data.