2020年7月21日 星期二

Google Forms inserting at top of Sheet

I just wanted to mention some basics of how Google Forms work with the Form Responses 1 tab.

 When you create a Form and it is linked to the Form Responses 1 tab we think the form submissions are appended. But they are not. They are inserted. The form internally kees track of where the new submissions are to be inserted. It works like this by design.

 After the form has been created the first submission will be inserted into roe 2 and the initial row 2 is pushed down and becomes row 3. When the second form submission is received it is inserted into row 3 and the previous row 3 is pushed down and becomes row 4 and so on..

 So if you had pasted data manually from row 2 downwards as you have explained the form still will insert the first form submission into row 2 and push you pasted data down.

 The reason it has been designed to insert is so that data is not automatically overwritten. To demonstrate what I am getting at I created a new test form.

 Below is the spreadsheet that was created and as you can see, before I performed any submissions I when ahead and selected row 2 and highlighted it in yellow.

 


 Then I entered data into the form, in this case, the first submission.
and submitted the form and you will see below the first submission was inserted into row 2 pushing the yellow highlighted row down to row 3



I then called the form up again and entered the second submission and submitted it and you will notice the second submission was inserted in front of the yellow highlighted row pushing it down again.



As you can see, the yellow highlighted row started as row 2 but is now row 4 after the 2 submissions. So this is not a bug. It is how the form submissions are inserted into the Form Responses 1 tab

The next test I did was to insert 2 rows between row 1 and row 2 forcing all the rows below to be pushed down.



I then copied 2 rows of data from somewhere else and pasted it into rows 2 and 3



Then I filled the form in again with the 3rd submission. I then submitted it and you will see below submission 3 was inserted above the yellow highlighted row.



 This demonstrates that the form keeps track of the form submission and inserts then based on that.

So really, if you wanted to have your old data above the form submissions you should have inserted rows between rows 1 and 2 and pasted the data. Then the form submission would have been inserted below the pasted data.