How to Schedule your Google Forms and Limit Submissions

When you create a Google Form, it is public by default meaning anyone who has the link to the form can submit a response. Any quiz, poll or survey created inside Google Forms has no expiration date and it can collect unlimited number of responses until the form owner decides to manually close* the form.

For some Google Forms though, limits may be necessary.

• If you are using Google Forms to accept entries for an online contest or a giveaway on your website, you may only want to accept the first ‘n’ entries strictly on a first-come first-served basis and close the form once that limit has reached.
• If you are using Google Forms to collect sign-ups for an event, you may want specify a close date and automatically close the form once the event has ended.
• If you are teacher who is using Google Forms for creating quiz assignments for the class, you may want to set time limits so that your form is open only on specific days during school hours and closed at all other times.

How to Set Limits in Google Forms

Google Forms offers no option to either specify response limits or any expiration criteria but we can easily incorporate this functionality into our forms with the help of Google Forms add-ons.

To get started, install the Email Google Forms add-on from the Google store. This add-on, as the name suggests, is meant for sending forms response in an email message but it can also help you schedule Google Forms and limit responses.

After the add-on is installed, go to your Google Form and click the add-ons menu (it looks like a puzzle icon). Choose Email Notifications > Limit Google Form Responses and you’ll see the configuration screen as shown above (video).

Open Google Form Automatically

If your form is currently closed and not accepting responses, you can specify an open date and your closed Google Form will automatically open on the scheduled date. This is useful for event registration forms where the registrations should be opened for public only on a specific date.

Close Google Form Automatically

Next, you can specify the criteria when your Google Form should be closed for new responses. You can either specify the exact date when the form should be automatically closed or you can set the maximum number of responses that your form should allow before closing itself.

This is perfect option if you are planning to use Google Forms for registrations forms, surveys, contests or any other event that has a limited capacity or is valid only until a specific date and time.

Set the Closed Form Message

With the Google Form limiter, you can also specify the custom message that will be displayed when someone accesses your closed form. This message has to be in plain text and you cannot use rich formatting or HTML tags. You can however include line breaks, hyperlinks (URLs) and email addresses.

Open and Close Google Form on a Recurring Schedule

You can even setup recurring open and close schedule with the limiter. For instance, you can specify schedule such that your form will open every Monday and Tuesday between 8 AM and 11 AM. The form will not accept responses outside the specified time window.

The recurring schedule option should be useful for educators who only wish to provide access to the form to student on specific days during specific hours.

The Form limiter is written in Google Apps Script. You can find the source code on Github should you wish to roll out own customised limiter.

Also see: Create PDF documents from Google Forms

Important Things to Know

• If you’ve specified both Response Limits and a Closing Date, whichever comes first will close the Google Form. 
• The open and close date and time specified in the Google Form limiter are set as per the default timezone of your browser /computer.
• The actual open and close time may sometimes vary ± 20 minutes from the specified time due to certain technical limitations of Google add-ons.
• You can click the “Reset” button to completely remove the form schedule and closing limits.
• If you would like to manually close your Google Form for new responses, open the Form, go to the Response tab and uncheck the “Accepting Responses” option. You can re-open the form anytime later by checking the “Not Accepting Responses” button.

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How to Receive Push Notifications for Google Forms on your Mobile Phone

The Google Form Notifications add-on sends the form data in an email message each time a respondent submits your Google Form. The add-on can also send automated emails to form respondents as soon as they complete your Google Form.

The email notifications add-on for Google Forms can also send push notifications to your mobile phones and tablets as well. That means when respondents complete and submit your online Google Form, you’ll instantly get a real-time notification (sample) on your iPhone or Android phone.

The rich push notifications on your mobile can include answers from the Google Form as well as a link to the submitted form so you can view the form answers on your mobile device directly.

A fast response time is a key to success, especially in areas like customer service and closing sales leads, and mobile notifications will ensure that your important form entries are never lost in the daily deluge of emails.

Setup Mobile Notifications for Google Forms

It takes a few easy steps (video tutorial) to get up and running.

1. Install the Email Notifications for Google Forms from the Google add-on store.
2. Install the IFTTT mobile app on your Android or iPhone. It will work on the iPad and Android tablets as well.

Next, we need to create a connection between our Google Form and the IFTTT app so that mobile notifications are triggered on the mobile phone immediately after the form is submitted.

1. Configure IFTTT

Open ifttt.com on your desktop and create a new applet. Choose the Maker Webhooks service for if-this condition and select the “Receive a web request” trigger. Set the Event name as the name of your Google Form.

For if-this-then-that action, choose Notifications as the service and choose either “Send a notification from IFTTT app” or “Send a rich notification”. Choose the latter if you want to include the form response URL in the notification that can directly view on the mobile phone.

On the next screen, put in the Title field, for Message and for Link URL. Click the “Create Action” button and then press “Finish” (this is important) to make your IFTTT applet live.

2. Configure Google Forms

Open any Google Form, go to the Add-ons menu, choose Email Notifications and then select Mobile Notifications. Enter the Event name, the IFTTT key, and the notification text. You can put any in the text and these will be replaced with actual values filled by the user.

That’s it. Click the Test button to test the connection between the form and your mobile phone. If it works, click Save to enable mobile notifications.

If you have multiple Google Forms, you need to create separate IFTTT applets for each form and the event name should be unique for each applet.

Internally, when someone submits your form, the Google Addon triggers and sends a web request to the IFTTT service which in turn pushes the notification to your mobile device.

Troubleshooting Mobile Notifications

• Ensure that your mobile is connected to the Internet.
• The event name in the applet should match the event name in the form configuration.
• You are logged into the IFTTT app on your mobile phone.
• Check the activity log to ensure that notifications are getting sent.

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The Most Awesome Online Teachers for Learning Web Development

For the past few months, I have been on a learning spree looking to enhance my existing coding skills and also learn new programming languages and frameworks. In this process, I have watched a countless number of video tutorials and online courses that pertain to programming and, specifically, web development.

In my quest to become a better developer, I’ve come across several awesome “teachers” who aren’t just excellent programmers but awesome educators and have the art of explaining complex and difficult concepts.

Learn Modern Web Programming with the Best Online Teachers

This is an attempt to highlight the best instructors on the Internet for JavaScript, React, Redux, Node.js, Firebase (database and storage), Docker, Google Golang, Typescript, Flutter (for mobile app development), Dart, Git, Webpack and Parcel bundler.

I’ve taken courses by every single instructor mentioned here (PDF) and recommend them highly.

Language / Platform	Teacher / Course
React.js	Andrew Mead, Maximilian Schwarzmüller, Stephen Grider, Ryan Florence, Scott Tolinski, Elijah Manor, Brian Holt, Dave Ceddia, Kirupa Chinnathambi
Advanced JavaScript / ES6 / ES2017	Anthony Alicea, Wes Bos, Mark Zamoyta, Tyler McGinnis,  Mosh Hamedani, Kent C. Dodds, Kyle Simpson, Kyle Robinson Young, Brandon Morelli, Cody Seibert
Redux	Dan Abramov, Shaun Pelling, Bucky Roberts, Cory House
Dart & Flutter	Mary Xia & Matt Sullivan, Stephen Grider, Maximilian Schwarzmüller, Filip & Emily Fortuna
Docker / Kubernetes	Jake Wright, Stephen Grider, James Lee
Webpack / Parcel web bundler	Andrew Mead, Lawrence Whiteside, Sean Larkin, Petr Tichy, Brad Traversy, Max Schwarzmüller
Node.js	Maximilian Schwarzmüller, Stephen Grider, Andrew Mead, Azat Mardan, Anthony Alicea, Samer Buna
Git & Github	Trevor Miller, Alex Garret-Smith, Tom Preson-Werner, Daniel Shiffman
Go Language	Todd McLeod, Stephen Grider, Derek Banas, Jon Calhoun, Harrison Kinsley
TypeScript	Todd Motto, John Lidquist, Basarat Ali Syed, Marius Schulz
Firebase / Firestore	David East, Doug Stevenson, Shaun Pelling, Todd Kerpelman, Steve Kinney
Google Chrome Dev Tools	Paul Irish, Surma, Umar Hansa, Jon Kuperman
GraphQL	Andrew Mead, Stephen Grider

Also see: Learn How to Code Online

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How to Automatically Create PDFs with Google Form Responses

Google Forms are the best tool for creating online polls, surveys, quizzes, and questionnaires. The form submissions are automatically stored in Google Spreadsheets, making it easier for you to analyse the submissions, and your forms can receive an unlimited number of responses.

When a user submits your Google Form, a row is added to the destination Google Sheet with all the answers. The tutorial explains how you can save your Google Form responses in a customized PDF file in Google Drive and have it emailed automatically to one or more recipients via Gmail.

For this example, we are building an event registration form with Google Forms. The attendees fill the form, select the session(s) they wish to attend and an email confirmation is sent to them instantly. A PDF document is attached and it contains the form answers and also a dynamic QR Code that can be scanned at the event venue.

Create PDFs with Google Forms – DEMO

Before we get into the implementation details, please try the live workflow so you have a better idea of what we are building.

First, fill-in this Google Form and submit. Your form response is saved in this Google Sheet and, within a few seconds, you’ll receive a personalized email with a PDF attachment. It contains a QR code and a unique registration ID that is generated automatically with the =QRCODE() formula.

Internally, the workflow is using this Google Document to merge the Google Forms data into a PDF file. We picked PDF for this example but you can generate documents in any format including Word documents, Excel Spreadsheets, PowerPoint Slides, ePub and more.

How to Create PDF Documents with Google Form Responses

To get started, create a new Google Form and choose a destination Google Spreadsheet where the responses would get saved.

Next, create a template in either Google Docs, Google Slides or Google Sheets. In your template, the variable fields should be enclosed inside double curly braces and the field name should exactly match the question title in your Google Form.

For example, if your Google Form question is “Full Name”, the marker in your document template would be and it will be automatically replaced with the answer submitted by the form submitter.

Install Document Studio

Next, install Document Studio for Google Sheets and authorize the add-on. Now open the Google Spreadsheet that is storing your Google Form responses, go to the Add-ons menu, choose Document Studio and open the sidebar to build the workflow.

First, expand the Document Merge section and choose the document template from Google Drive that you have created in the previous step. Choose a file name of the exported file – it can be a fixed name – like event.pdf – or a dynamic name like .pdf where the file name is customized based on file answers.

Next, expand the Mail Merge section in Document Studio’s sidebar, turn on the “Send Emails” option and create an email template using the built-in WYSIWYG editor.

You can customize the template by adding variable placeholders, like , in the email subject and message body for personalized emails. Choose the field where you asking for the submitter’s email address to send them an email when they submit the form. You can add more emails (comma-separated) in the “Email Specific People” to notify more people when forms are submitted.

If you would like to add markers to the merged document that aren’t present in the Google Form, you can use the help of Google Sheets array formulas.

For instance, if your Google Form question is Full Name, you can add a new column in the Google Sheet for First Name and use the following formula to automatically get the first name from Google Form submissions that can be used in the email and document template.

Also see: How to Send Personalized Emails with Gmail

Finally, expand the “Finish and Merge” section and check the option Merge on Form Submit. Click Save to turn the workflow and submit a test entry in your Google Form.

You should find a personalized email with the merged document as a PDF attachment in your Gmail sent items. A copy of the PDF file is saved in your Google Drive that you can use to automatically print the Google Form response via Google Cloud Print.

If you are stuck, please watch the video tutorial (download) for a visual walkthrough.

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Help Locate your own Email Message in Someone Else’s Gmail

You’ve sent an important email to a colleague but it is lost in the deluge of emails they receive every day, buried and forgotten. They can obviously use Gmail search operators, like FROM: or SUBJECT:, to locate that email later but wouldn’t it be useful if there were a way to directly locate that one missing email in their mailbox.

Well, there’s an alternate search trick and the sender can actually help the recipient find any specific email message that they have sent in the past.

When you send an email through Gmail, a unique Message ID is added to the email header as per the RFC 822 specification. To know the ID of your message, open the email inside Gmail, go to 3-dot menu and choose Show Original. The Message-ID will be displayed in the first line of the header as shown the screenshot.

The Message ID of a particular email message is exactly the same for both the sender and the recipient. That means if the recipient opens the header of your email in their mailbox, the message ID will match that of the message in your Gmail sent folder.

Gmail offers a lesser-known search operator – rfc822msgid – that helps you search emails by their message ID.

So if our message ID is xyz@mail.gmail.com, a simple search like rfc8222msgid:xyz@mail.gmail.com will return the exact email in search results.

And that’s the trick. This search query will work for both the recipient and the email sender. So if you pass the message ID to the recipient, they can simply use the rfc822msgid operator to locate a specific email from you in their own mailbox.

Since the recipient ID is too complex, you can simply copy of the URL of the Gmail search page and pass them to the recipient. The URL will work for them as well since the Message ID is the same for them as well.

You can also use this search trick to bookmark emails in the browser.

Also see: Send Personalized Emails with Gmail

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