For 40-some-odd years, the world of spreadsheets has been ruled by one king: Microsoft Excel. Sure, there were far away challengers that tried to overtake the beast—I’m looking at you, Lotus 1-2-3—but none have come close to dethroning the powerful tool…until Google Sheets.
So what is Google Sheets? It’s a cloud-based spreadsheet. Think Excel, but online. “But Excel is online, ” you say. Yes! But Google was there first, and really has the advantage over Excel in this arena. It’s quicker and easier to use for collaboration.
Google Sheets is also free; Excel has monthly/yearly subscriptions.
If you’d like to get the most out of the software, then let’s get started!
Note: This book is the Google Sheets portion of the larger work: The Ridiculously Simple Guide to Google Apps (G Suite).This book is not endorsed by Alphabet, Inc.
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One area Google Sheets has Excel and other programs beat is it’s survey integration.
Using Google Forms to create a survey, you can have all the answers go right into a Google Sheet so you can collate your results.
To get started go to Insert > Forms.
This is going to launch a separate tab with the Google Forms application.

I’m going to make this survey simple, but if you want to jazz it up, there’s all kinds of options for adding photos and changing styles around. Use the menu on the right side for those options.
For my survey, I’m going to make it a drop-down survey. You can change the question type by selecting the drop down to the right side of the question name; you can have as many types as you want in the survey—for example, question one could be multiple choice and question two could be a drop down.

This changes our answers to editable fields. Right now, it has room for two questions. As soon as I stop typing in the second answer, a slot will be added for a third question.

More answer slots are added with each question.

When you are done, click the “Send Form” button in the upper right corner:

I don’t want to send the form to anyone—I want it to be a link. So, I’m going to click the link icon next to the email one (it’s the middle one).

When someone goes to my survey, it will look a little bit different from the one that was in the editor because all the menu fields are gone.

Once they click submit, they’ll see a confirmation. You can make this a custom confirmation or use the default Google one.

Now that you have a response, go back to your Sheet and you’ll see a new tab has been added on the bottom of the sheet for form responses.

Click that and you can see what the person answered.

If you need to make changes to it, just go to Form from your menu bar.

If you have multiple forms, then this option will no...
