How I changed the Form while it was getting responses.

We made a Consumer Survey which was getting responses since Sep 4. Meanwhile, there was a workshop in which there were suggestions to alter the sequence of options in some questions and the sequence of questions itself. There were 19 questions.

I did it as follows.

I opened the Form for editing and disconnected from net to prevent auto-saves.

I made all the changes.

I came online and saved the form. Before clicking on save I unchecked "Accepting responses" and checked it again after saving.

How to embed Forms on Google Sites.

When you create a Spreadsheet Form you get a long URL like https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX..

It is better to embed the URL on your blog or site or Google Site. Embeding on Google Sites is very easy. You just create a page on Google Site and insert the Spreadsheet Form.

While inserting you need to give the required height and width of the form which you can get by clicking Form/Embed_form_in_a_webpage on spreadsheet. e.g.:
iframe src="https://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX" width="760" height="3744" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading.../iframe

Just take the width and height from the embed link and put it while inserting on Google Sites.

If you want to embed on any other site or blog you need the whole link with iframe command.

Configuring Pidgin to connect to Google Talk for my domain.

Being Linux user I have been using Pidgin for Google Talk on my gmail account. After becoming the Administrator of my domain and putting up Google Talk Badge on public Google sites I was using the service through gmail account @my_domain.

Today I discovered how to set up Pidgin for my domain and there is no need to login to gmail account @my_domain to chat with the visitors to the sites.

This is how I did it:

Basic Tab
Username: admin (this is my username@my_domain)
Domain: my_domain.com
Local alias: Web Administrator

 Advanced Tab
Connect server: talk.google.com

Now whenever, the visitor at my domain site clicks on "Chat with Web Administrator" badge I get a message on Pidgin "Accept chat invitation?" and after clicking on Accept the Conversation window opens.

If the visitor to this site clicks on "Chat with Kamalakar Agashe" badge on right side bar I get same message on Pidgin but when I see my userid in the conversation window I understand that this is a visitor to my blog and not the site @my_domain

Putting long Questionnaire on Google Sites using Spreadsheet Forms.

In the project we are handling on our Intranet there are long Questionnaires (about 50 questions) to be put up on Google Sites for MSMEs (Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises). We tried to design the questions with possible answers included but answers to many questions was descriptive. The Questionnaires were prepared in Google Spreadsheet Forms and embeded on public Google Site on our domain.

When we tested the Questionnaires it was found that the respondents may need lot of assistance. Accordingly the site was designed as follows:

Home Page with Description regarding the Questionnaire and click-able links to the embeded Questionaires and support pages.
Pages with Questionnaires on Spreadsheet Forms embeded
Page with detailed Instructions for filling up the Questionnaires (Main Support Page)
Chat page with Google Talk Badge of Support Person.
Contact Us page with brief Support Spreadsheet Form
Downloads page with PDFs of Instructions and Questionnaires.
Sidebar with the links to pages in proper order.

For me this is going to be a very exciting project.

Some tips for using Google Forms.

Tip No 1: Formats of Data
Although the Forms accepts the data as Text the Spreadsheet interprets it as text, number, currency, %, Date etc. Therefore, you need to format those fields correctly in the spreadsheet. If you are seeking a Date in the form you should ask in the format MM/DD/YYYY or YYYY/MM/DD etc depending upon how it is formatted in the spreadsheet. Suppose a numerical input in the form is  starting with a leading zero the leading zero gets eliminated unless you format the column as text. For formating the columns in the spreadsheet you have to use the 123 button.

Tip No 2: How to delete the Summary Responses
Suppose you want to delete the summary responses and start fresh it is not sufficient to delete the data in the spreadsheet since the data used for showing the responses is stored on Google's servers. You need to proceed as follows:
Open the spreadsheet
Click on Form/Edit_form
Keeping the form open on the popped up window click on Form/Delete_form in the spreadsheet.
Click to edit any field in the form, don't change anything and click on Done button.
Save the form.

Tip No 3: How to get Notifications when a form is filled.
Click on Tools/Notification_rules in the spreadsheet.
Put a check-mark in the box A_user_submits_a_form
Put a check-mark in the E-mail-daily_digest or right_away.
Click on save.

Tip No 4: How to make a Form from an existing spreadsheet
You can make a Form from an existing spreadsheet. The Data Fields should be present in the first row. Click on Form/Create_form and a Form is created using the fields. All Question become  "Text" type by default and you need to edit the questions to make them Multiple choice, Checkboxes etc. as required. After you save the form an additional column Timestamp gets inserted as first column in the spreadsheet.

Tip No 5: How to make another form from an existing form
If you want to make some modifications to an existing form and use it you can do this by clicking on File/Make_a_copy in existing spreadsheet, give a name to the spreadsheet, then click on Form/Edit_Form in the new spreadsheet.

First visitor to this blog from search engine.

I get average 60 visitors per day to my linux blog. This blog being less than one month old was not getting any visitor from search engine.

Finally, I got a visitor searching for "gantt chart archlinux" and landed on my site since the blog appeared at fourth place on first page.

This blog has a page with title "Using Gantt Chart Template" but the page has nothing to do with his additional term "archlinux". Even then the visitor was satisfied with the information on the page since he spent 3 minutes on the site. I am also happy that he was a linux user. I use Ubuntu but experiment with other linux distributions as well and my linux blog tells all about it.

Needless to say my thanks go to Google Analytics which gets me the visitor's information.