Whether you are looking to add a basic “Contact Me” form to your website or need to create a complex online poll with conditional branching, Google Docs is an excellent tool for you. It offers a variety of themes, data can be easily exported and, unlike other polling software, your Google Docs forms can accept any number of responses without the fee.

There’s one limitation though. Google Docs can send email notifications as soon as people submit your online form but, as shown in the above screenshot, there’s no form data included in that email message. You’ll have to open the corresponding Google Docs spreadsheet to see that actual form data which is not always a very convenient option.

From Google Docs Form to your Email Inbox

Should you wish to receive Google Docs form data in an email message as soon as a user submits the form, there’s an easy workaround as explained in the following video.

The trick is that you associate a send mail routine with your Google Docs form that triggers as soon as a “form submit” action happens. And this routine, written using Google Apps Script, does all the magic – it reads the form values that were just submitted and sends them all in one message to a pre-defined address.

Here’s how you can add email capabilities to your Google Forms step by step:

1. Create a new form in Google Docs (or use any of your existing forms) and switch to the Spreadsheet view.
2. Go to Tools –> Script Editor and copy-paste the following code in that code editor window. Replace the value of variable “email” with your own email address.

function sendFormByEmail(e)
{
  // Remember to replace XYZ with your own email address
  var email = "XYZ";
  // Optional but change the following variable
  // to have a custom subject for Google Docs emails
  var subject = "Google Docs Form Submitted";
  // The variable e holds all the form values in an array.
  // Loop through the array and append values to the body.
  var message = "";
  for(var field in e.namedValues) {
    message += field + ' :: '
               + e.namedValues[field].toString() + "\n\n";
  }
  // This is the MailApp service of Google Apps Script
  // that sends the email. You can also use GmailApp here.
  MailApp.sendEmail(email, subject, message);
  // Watch the following video for details
  // http://youtu.be/z6klwUxRwQI
  // By Amit Agarwal - www.labnol.org
}

3. Next go to Triggers –> Current Script’s Triggers and associate the Send Mail function with “On Form Submit” event.
4. Save the Google script, authorize Google Docs to access your Gmail account (for sending email) and you’re done.

Advanced users can further customize the script to have custom email subject lines that match one of the form fields. Alternatively, you can specify the form submitter’s email address as the replyto address and thus you can directly respond to the user by replying to that email notification.

Also see: Perform Mail Merge in Gmail using Google Docs

This story, Get Form Data from Google Docs in an Email Message [Video Tutorial], was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 23/02/2012 under Google Docs, Polls, Internet.

Do you want to put all your Google Docs files on a USB drive before you take that road trip? The Google Docs website does offer an easy option to help you download all your documents in one zip file but there’s another simpler alterative that you may want to give a try– it’s called Google Takeout.

Once you have logged in to Google Takeout with your Google Account, select the Google Docs service and hit the “Create Archive” button. It will create a zip file with all your Google Docs files and you can either keep the browser window open while the archive is being readied or download that file later from the Google Takeout website.

Google Takeout will export your Google Documents in standard Office file formats by default – Excel for spreadsheets or PowerPoint for Presentations – but you also have an option to export files in either PDF or OpenOffice formats.

Google Takeout is part of dataliberation.org, a Google project that wants to make it easy for you to import and export data out of various Google products. The same tool may also be used to export your Picasa photos and Contacts data out of Google Servers though, surprisingly, it doesn’t offer Gmail export yet.

Coming back to Google Docs, here’s a quick video that shows how easy it is to export your Google Docs files using Google Takeout.

This story, Export all your Google Docs Files with One Click, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 06/02/2012 under Export, Google Docs, Internet.

You may also like:

1. How Guest Can Upload Files to Your Google Docs
2. Zoho Will Help Backup All Your Google Docs Documents Locally
3. Convert Web Files to PDF with Google Docs Viewer
4. Use Google Docs To Compare Two Text Files Online
5. Upload Office Files to Google Docs From The Right Click Menu

Google Docs is integrated with Google Image Search to help you quickly find and insert web photographs in your documents. The results are filtered to only show images that have been licensed under Creative Commons and labeled for commercial reuse so  you are legally allowed to insert these images in your documents.

Other than Creative Commons, there’s a new image search option available in Google Docs that will help you find professionally shot photographs for your documents. Google has partnered with stock photography services like Photos.com to offer royalty-free stock images inside Google Docs, just like Microsoft PowerPoint.

How to Insert Stock Images in Google Docs

While you are inside the edit view of a document, go to Insert –> Images –> Stock Photos and use the search function. The collection of stock photographs available inside Google Docs isn’t as big as what is offered by Microsoft Office but that should possibly change once Google signs up with more partners.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_a51-TGoyg

Other than Google Documents, the option to insert stock photographs is available in Presentations and Google Spreadsheets as well. Thank you Eric Curtis.

This story, Add Stock Photos to your Google Documents, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 14/12/2011 under Google Docs, Internet.