Tutorial - Using Google Drive Form Builder to Create the Application for your Craft Show Website

This is a tutorial to go along with my series on Directing a Craft Show.
(See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)

In an earlier post, I suggested using Google Drive to create your application and having your website dump the responses to a spreadsheet on your Google Drive. Here I show you how to do that.

There are some advantages to having your application online. One is that you don't have paper applications floating around getting lost or displaying people's personal information. But the main one is that it is easier for vendors to use.

This tutorial is for the mostly techno-illiterate folks out there that like step-by-step instructions. If you like to play around with software and apps to figure them out, well you don't need me - just go for it! Feel free to skip down to the part where we start building the form if you are familiar with Google Drive or already have an account. This tutorial starts at the very beginning for people who like everything spelled out step by tiny step.

Step 1 - Create a Google Account

You need a Google account to do this. If you already have one, skip to step 2.

If you are starting out fresh, and have not done anything for your show except read my blog, set up a brand new Google account for your craft show committee. In the process you will create a Gmail email address. You and your committee will use that email for everything craft show. Seriously, even if your organization already has an email address, you want one for your craft show. Trust me on this. At first you will whine and say, "But Staci, I don't want to have to check ANOTHER email address..." Yes, you do. Trust me. Some day you may be swamped with applications; go on vacation a month before the craft show; unexpectedly have a family member be hospitalized a week out or whatever, and what will you do if the emails are coming to your personal email? You will have to give someone else your personal email account information or forward every single craft show related email to them... Ugh! No! No! No! And what if your organization's president/secretary/techie who checks your organization email accidentally deletes an email you want for the craft show because she is not obsessing on craft show details like you are? Or marks it as read and you miss an application? Listen to me, you want a different account just for the craft show. No one would do these things maliciously, but it is confusing to have event mail and regular organization business email going into the same box. Who needs more confusion?

So stop arguing with me in your mind -- I know you already have your personal email and all that. I know you don't want to check ANOTHER email. You think you will forget. And it will only be used for about 3-4 months out of the year. yes, I know. Go ahead and make a gmail account. Don't worry, I will walk you through it.

Go to www.google.com. In the upper right corner of your screen you should see a blue box that says sign in.

HINT: If you already have a personal account or someone else is signed in, you will see a picture or a blue shadow silhouette circle instead of a Sign In button. If you don't see the sign in box, click on the picture or blue circle and then click to sign the person out. Then go back to www.google.com to continue with this tutorial.

Click on the blue box that says "Sign In." You will be given the option to sign in with any existing accounts on the computer you are using. But don't do that. At the bottom of the list of accounts that are available you will see in blue a link to Add account. Click there.

This will bring up a form for you to fill out to create your account.

You will have to choose a user name for your email. This is your email name. Make it related to your craft show (like MyChurchCraftShow). It should be easy to remember. (BTW, Gmail doesn't care if you use upper or lower case letters, they both "look" the same to gmail, but using upper and lower case can help you and your customers/vendors/etc. see your name easier.)

You will also have to choose a password.

• DO make it easy to remember.
• DO make it generic enough (at least 6 characters with a number) so you can use it for lots of other craft show accounts -- like the accounts you will create to advertise your event.
• DO NOT choose your personal, go-to favorite password. You will be sharing this with others on your committee.  
• DO NOT use the same one you use for financial accounts for your group - like paypal or Square.

If you already have a craft show email somewhere, you don't have to change it, just get a Google account to go with your existing email. When you are filling out the form, select where it says I prefer to use my current email address.

FILL IN THE FORM

You have to give information such as a name and birthday. I am not going to tell you what to do here, but your committee can decide to use a real name and someone's actual information or make something up like "Mrs. CraftShow Committee". That might be the thing to do if you know your director will rotate each year.

Finish the process, which will mean verifying the account in some way. If you used an existing email account, they will send you an email to verify it. You can also verify it via a phone/text. Whatever you choose is fine, just "get 'er done."

Once you are verified, you will be taken to a page to build a profile. You can skip adding a photo and building your public profile, or simply add in some rough details. I'm not covering that part in this tutorial. You can add as many details as you like. Come on back here when you are done to move on to the next step.

Step 2 - Sign in to your Google Account

OK, glad to have you back!

Now we are ready to build a form in Google Drive! Yay!

Sign in to your Google account. Go to www.google.com and click the blue box that says "Sign In."

You may already be signed in depending on your settings. You can verify that by looking at the top right hand corner of the screen. It may be a little different from this based on your preferences, but at the top, you should see a menu bar that looks something like the one below. It will have +You instead of +Staci, but it should look pretty close to this if you are signed in. If you added a profile picture, that picture will be in a circle at the top instead of a blue silhouette.

See that icon that looks like a set of 9 blocks? That icon is for Google Apps. Click on that icon and a screen pops up with some app choices. One of those apps is Google Drive. The picture (icon) for Google Drive looks like a triangle. Click on Google Drive.

TIP: Since you will be coming to this page often, during the few months preceding your event, I recommend you go ahead and bookmark this page and add it to your bookmark bar. [Did you know you can just put the icon on the bar instead of the whole name?]

The very first time you sign in to Google Drive, you will see this pop-up:

It will kind of walk you through some of the general features of Drive. Go ahead and hit the X in the gray box to get out of it. You can always go back through it later by clicking on the picture of Drive that says "...get started..." as seen behind the pop-up windows below.

MAKE A FOLDER

You don't HAVE to make a folder, but I need one because I didn't have a separate account for our craft show. (See, you get to learn from my experience!!) So I keep the show documents separate from say my homeschool documents and church documents with folders.

HOWEVER, even if you DO have a separate account for your show (which really, really, really you should!!), you can keep each year's documents organized by making folders, so you might as well go ahead and make one now. It won't hurt, I promise!

Do you see that red button that says "New" on the left side of the screen? Click it. A list will appear showing the new things you can make. Choose Folder by clicking on the word. You will now give your folder a name, like "Craft Show 2015" and ta-da! You have created a folder.

Now you will see your folder in the middle of the screen. It may look a little different depending on whether you have a list (like in the photo below) or icons (like the Drive icon above).

Double click to open your folder.

Now let's make that form!

Step 3: Using Google Form Builder to Build an Online Application for Your Craft Show

Click on the red New button again. See at the bottom of your list of choices it says More? Click on More. You should see Google Forms. Select (click on) Google Forms.

By the way, if you like icons more than lists or lists more than icons, you can change the way your screen looks with the icons on the upper right hand of your screen. [Play with that later! Not now.]

Your brand new form will not be very pretty (yet). First look at the top where it says Form Settings. You have some options there. 

You can opt to let the people who are filling it out know how much progress they have made. (Well sure, why not? Especially if you want a LOT of information.) 

You can allow only one response per person -- if you choose this option you will have to have them log in. I don't recommend that. 

You can shuffle the order of the questions. (Great for teachers making an online quiz, not so great for a craft show application.)

Once you have made your decisions, its time to actually make the application.

You need to click where it says "Untitled form" and give it a good name like "My Craft Show Application 2015" or "The Best Craft Show Application Ever Made" or something like that which will suit your show and not upset your committee. Something that lets you know what this thing is in case you get all excited about forms and make 20 of them for every part of your organization. The date is a good idea in case you change it next year. [Ya never know, you might open up a new space or offer new options or something else equally wonderful next year and make this application obsolete. :-)]

So name it well. Then let's begin to make it.

For each question on the application, you have several choices to make and information to provide. Question Title, Help Text, Question Type, Advanced Settings and Required Question. We will cover each one in turn below. 

As you finish one question and are ready to add another, click on the "Add Another" button to go to the next question.

Question Title

The Question Title is simply the particular information you are looking for, like the vendor's name. I'd start with that one. Type in what you want to know. Be specific. For several of our applications I had the first name and last names as separate blanks/questions on our applications. I did this so I could sort the data table by last name (which is helpful for check in!). This last year I had them both in the same field and sorted by first name. Ha! It worked! People know both and tell you both when they check in. So, do whichever suits you bets. First Name, Full Name, Vendor Name or just Name. 

Help Text

Just in case there is confusion, there is a field for Help Text where you can clarify. ("Please tell us your first and last name.") Most of the time the questions you are going to ask are pretty standard and do not need an explanation, but just in case, you've got a line here to explain yourself. [By the way, Help Text is optional.]

Required Question

Not all questions should be required. Not all vendors have a website. Not all have a business name. But if you have to have some information (name and contact info for sure!), then make sure the box is checked. Otherwise vendors won't give you that information and you will be scrambling to get it.

Question Type

The next choice you have to make is Question Type. There are several options to choose from. When you click on the button, a list will pop up to choose from. 

So you need to select which type of answer you are looking for. 

TEXT/PARAGRAPH TEXT

Most of your questions will be Text or Paragraph Text, which is just a longer area to leave an answer. A text box is just what it sounds like, the person answering the question merely types in their answer. You will use text for their name, phone number, business name, website, etc.

MULTIPLE CHOICE

You might choose Multiple Choice if you are asking a yes/no question like, "Are you a returning vendor?" In this case you will give them two choices. If you have multiple rooms, and they get to chose you can list the rooms. You can even ask the vendors to give you their first room choice then in the next question ask them for their second room choice, etc. 

Multiple choice answers are mutually exclusive. When you choose one, you automatically don't choose the other choices. If you want vendors to be able to choose more than one answer, use checkboxes. 

CHECKBOXES

If you ask them to categorize their merchandise, you might use Checkboxes and allow them to choose multiple answers. For instance, I might ask, "What kind of merchandise do you sell?" and it look like this:

And if you click on the blue "add other" option, it will add a checkbox for "Other" and allow the person filling out the form to specify what that "Other" thing is. (Maybe you will change your application next year if you have lots of people selling blue stars. :-)

CHOOSE FROM A LIST

Choosing from a list is pretty much like multiple choice. It looks like Checkboxes without the boxes. It is a good option when you want them to choose one item from a number of choices. It has a really great feature: Depending on the choice they make, you can direct them to another page.

OTHER QUESTION TYPES

I am not sure of a use for Scale, grid, date or time (each response is automatically date and time stamped when the answers are submitted) for a craft show application. If you know of one, comment! I'll update my tutorial.

Advanced Settings

So, you are trucking right along making up your application questions (good job!) and you notice that the different question types have something called "Advanced settings." These are some really cool options for data validation and data formatting. If you are starting to get overwhelmed, feel free to skip past this part. Everything else is optional here. But in the name of thoroughness, I'll cover them for ya.

Each question type has their own advanced settings except for text and paragraph text, which are the same. Mostly this is for data validation purposes. My hubby is a computers guy and he talks about data validation all the time, so by osmosis I kind of know what that is. Basically, it is a test that can be done to make sure someone is giving you a real answer, a valid answer. So you get the kind of answer you are expecting.

Let's look at each in turn.

Text and Paragraph Text: There are a number of data validation settings you can use for text. If you want to explore your options, click the checkbox that says "Data Validation." 

Numbers: For instance, if you want them to tell you how many widgets they have sold in the last 3 months, you can choose number and specify that it is greater than 1. 

If you have asked for their phone number, a data validation choice you can make is to chose number, and specify that the number is greater than, 1000000000 which in phone number formatting would look like (100)000-0000. If your vendor doesn't put in his area code (which we have to have these days, but people assume you know), this kind of data validation would send the vendor an error and make them re-enter their data. 

Text: You have some further options here, like you can have the form check to see if they have entered a valid website URL, email address, or contains a certain word or text string.

Multiple Choice: The only option is to shuffle the order of the choices. If you were getting an opinion, this would help eliminate bias. If you were a teacher giving a test this would help eliminate cheating. But for our purposes, I'm not sure shuffling would help us, so leave it off.

Checkboxes: The data validation options have to do with how many selections can be made. Check "Data Validation" then "select at least", "select at most" or "select exactly". Then put in the number. So if you want your vendor to choose no more than three of your seven choices, you would choose "select at most" and type in 3. Then, you can add a custom message to be displayed if the vendor chooses more than 3 such as - "Please limit your choices to 3." Pretty straightforward. You also have the option to shuffle the option order.

Choose from a list: Since you can only choose one option, there is really no data validation. The only option is to shuffle the option order.

I won't go into the advanced options for the other types of questions because I don't think you will use them. Again, if someone can come up with a good example of how we'd use them for a craft show application, I will add them to my tutorial here and possibly to my application for 2015. (Hey, I have a LOT of experience, but I'm not above learning a new trick. I'm not that old!)

Finish asking all the questions you want to ask. Look back over your form by using the scroll bar or the arrow keys. You can move them around by clicking and dragging the whole question section up or down. After adding all the questions and making sure it looks like you want it to look, click the big blue button at the bottom that says "Done." 

Make yourself you favorite beverage to celebrate!! Do the happy dance!!

Actually, when you click "Done" you will gt this screen:

You have more choices to make. What do you want to happen when the vendor finishes the application? You can check or uncheck all of these. 

You DO NOT want to check the box that is checked above, "Show link to submit another response" because you don't want the vendor to submit another form. 

You DO NOT want to publish and show a public link because you don't want the vendor to see other vendor's information.

You may or may not want to allow responders to edit responses. I'd say NO. 

So uncheck all three boxes and click "Send Form" and this new screen pops up:

From here you can send the form via email or link it to your Google+, Facebook or Twitter account. If your website is up and running, click on the "Embed"  button. This will bring up the HTML code for the form that you can add to your website.

You will copy and paste the whole HTML code from this text box. It is way longer than what shows. When you click on the text (anywhere), it will highlight the whole thing and a little message pops up that says, "Press Ctrl+C to copy." Hold down the Control key and press the C key to copy the entire code. Then open your website builder program and paste it in where you want it.

Don't forget to publish the changes to your website. Close the website builder website and open the website. Test your form by filling it out and submitting it. 

CHECK the answers by going back to Google Drive. You will now see your form and your form with "(responses)" after it. The responses document is the one you want to open. Check out the submitted form. If you need to make changes, click on the original form and change as needed. Don't forget to recopy it to your website and republish your website. 

Then, when it is working just as you like, seriously, pour yourself that beverage and do the happy dance because you are so done. Woo Hoo!