Hello everyone! In today’s Techsploration article we will be discussing one of Google Suite’s free tools called Google Form. In this article, we will talk about how it collects data, how you can specify what data you want to collect, ways to stop gathering data through an addon called FormLimiter.

First, let's discuss how Google Forms collect data. By default, your form will act as your everyday form. Data will be entered based on the questions or fields that you have created for your audience. You can change how the form will accept this data by changing it into a quiz in the settings tab pictured below. As a quiz, you can make the questions have graded weight similar to an everyday quiz. Your options on how to collect data will be the same as your normal form though. 

Now let’s move on to how to specify the data that you want to collect. You will have the ability to choose what type of question it will be when you click on the box in the top right of field. The box pictured below will be your options.

When you choose ‘short answer’ as your question type, you will have the option to select “Response Validation” when you click on the ellipsis. Response Validation is what we need to activate whenever we want to force a specific type of data to be collected. When it is activated, you get various options of what you want to collect based on text, numbers, length, or patterns. This can be useful for collecting phone numbers, limiting paragraph responses, or requiring lengthy answers. If they do not match how you want your data to be validated, you can set an error message to be displayed that can guide your audience. The error message will display in red text below the answer box, so if you want them to match a pattern you can enter “Please type ###-###-####.” That will only work if that was the pattern you made though. 

Now that you know how to collect data, and what way you would want it to be collected, let's talk about how to stop collecting data. Let’s say you only wanted to take data for a month, Google doesn’t have a way to stop a form from taking answers. That’s where the add-on FormLimiter comes in. It allows you to stop taking information based on date, max responses, and more.