14 DAY TRIAL // 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.
=1600+Pennsylvania+Ave&entry_3=pistachios|spinach|broccoli&entry_4=8/4/1967
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.
