How To Get Emailed When Someone Submits A Google Docs Form

How To Get Emailed When Someone Submits A Google Docs Form:from Business 2 Community by Kim Castleberry

Enable Email Notifications for your Google Forms

Find out by email when someone fills out your Google Docs (Google Drive) web form!
Google Web Forms are my favorite way to easily poll your web community due to their flexibility, ease of use, and cost (free)!
While I make a lot of use of them for getting feedback from my email list and for collecting, I’ve been puzzling over other possible uses of this cool tool.
In my ongoing quest to use less plugins (an important part of optimizing for SEO, since they slow your site down), I’ve been wondering if I could find a way to not use plugins for my blog’s contact form.
Of course, the problem remains that I want the data to stay as close to me as possible.
I don’t trust just anyone with my contact form!
Though the email output is not nearly as stylized and easy to reply to as that produced by Contact Form 7 (which I highly recommend), it’s “good enough” if I’m willing to deal with it.

Enabling Email Notifications For Google Forms

To enable email notifications for your Google Docs spreadsheet forms, simply visit the spreadsheet and go to Tools -> Notification Rules… -> Submits A Form / Frequency -> Save – > Done

Once you receive the notification email, click the “Preview” link to see a preview of your spreadsheet right in gmail. (Preview may not work for mobile phones.)
Unlike the emails you get from Contact Form 7, you will need to copy/paste the email out of the spreadsheet and into a NEW email (not a reply or you might forward your form preview) in order to reply. Whether this will be a chore or note will depend on how many contact form submissions, that need responded to, you receive per day.
It is possible, but more technical, to do things such as adding CAPTCHA and controlling form styling, but those are not native features of Google Docs.
As you can see, enabling email notification, from your Google Docs spreadsheet forms gives you additional potential uses (such as contact forms) for them that I did not cover in the prior training! (And when combined with Google Drive and the ability to use Google Docs as a Word/Office replacement, the integration is really cool!)
Have you taken advantage of Google Docs & Google Drive yet?
I have now replaced my contact form (check it out). As to whether it will get spammed badly because it lacks captcha, I do not really know yet.
PS: Looking for even more powerful form management? Be sure to check out Gravity Forms & Formidable Pro!
image source: Screenshots via Kimberly Castleberry, icon logo via Google