The Forms in Google Docs Get Some New Features

Google Docs engineers mustn’t have slept a lot lately, since massive new features have been rolled out from this project. The latest press release from the Mountain View-based giant brings good news for Google Docs fanatics. Cool new features like pre-filled forms, bidirectional form content, a more secure way to protect documents, grid questions and improved graph and chart types have hit the web and are bound to make a splash.

For sure, the most important is an improved way to protect online stored documents. Until now, when accessing a Google online document, users already authenticated on one of Google's services were automatically granted access to that document. Now, if a user wants to protect a form from spam bots or any other unauthorized access, they can simply choose to require every user to sign-in again before viewing a form.

Pre-filling forms have always been a good method around the web whenever complex surveys or contact forms were used. The technique is used when a tip of what should be entered in a field is required. This can be done by simply entering some variables in the form's URL. We took this example and sample photos provided by the Google Docs team.


Since many cultures and languages around the world use right-to-left text (Persian, Arabic, Hebrew), Google has followed its own advice and introduced this feature in the Docs service, after previously introducing the same feature in Gmail and Google Apps.

As recent surveys have shown, the Google Docs service is mostly used for its simple way of building surveys or gather data from a multitude of users, so it is imperative that building those surveys is as simple as taking them. For this, engineers have built a simple grid question survey builder where users have only to fill their predetermined answers on a column header, and simply add a new question per row.

After the survey has been filled by users, the owner (and the users as well, if the owner chooses so) can simply view the results on a summary page complete with statistics and suggestive graphs or charts. These charts have also been tuned up to look a lot sleeker with detailed legend fields and better formatting per question.