Forms are great for collecting information and payments without the hassle of paper forms or PDFs but they can present their own challenge: how do you share the data and work with it? 

Consider a registration form for a July 4th party. Your club's social chair and possibly several volunteers will want to keep track of the RSVPs as they come in and take action -- ordering food, preparing treat bags for kids, etc. It's easy enough to have the form entries emailed to multiple people and you could give everyone who needs it access to the Member Splash dashboard to view the form entries. You can also provide a much easier way to handle this scenario: Google Spreadsheets integration.

All Member Splash client clubs are provided a Google Drive folder where they can have any forms automatically create and update a Google Spreadsheet.

Enabling Sheets Integration

You connect forms to sheets on a per-form basis. For any form you wish to connect to Google Sheets simply hover over the form name, choose Settings, and then click on Google Spreadsheet Add-on. 

That will bring up the screen shown below. It is possible to have a single form write to more than one Google Spreadsheet. For this example we'll assume you're writing to a single spreadsheet so we'll only configure one feed.

Click on either Add New or create one. On the next screen you'll give the feed a name and pick the spreadsheet it should write to or create a new spreadsheet. The name is strictly for your internal use and can be whatever you want. If, for example, you were configuring one feed to write just participant names and contact info. to a spreadsheet you plan to share with the instructor and another feed to write to a spreadsheet that includes payment information you are going to share with your treasurer, you would want to give them names that make it clear which is which. 

If you are creating a new spreadsheet do that first as it will reload the screen and you'll have to re-enter the Feed Name.

Once you have set up a new spreadsheet you need to update the Feed Settings by selecting the spreadsheet name and then the sheet (tab). After you select the sheet it will automatically refresh the page and provide options for mapping form fields to the spreadsheet. 

NOTE: Google refers to spreadsheet tabs as sheets.

Now click Update Settings. 

Mapping Form Fields to Spreadsheet Columns

The next step is to choose which form fields you would like to write out to the Google Spreadsheet. If there are existing headers in the spreadsheet you will be able to choose from them. You can also create headers.

If you want to create a new column in the spreadsheet you can do that by choosing Add Custom Key from the Select a Field dropdown. 

To map a form field with the entry date to the spreadsheet you would fill out the settings as shown below and click Add Field. 

If you have the spreadsheet open in a separate tab you'll see the header get added.

Repeat for as many form fields as you would like to add. 

When mapping fields with a numeric value, you may notice that they are place on the spreadsheet with a single quotation mark before the number value like this: 

If you format the affected cells as plain text and then sync, they should sync without the single quotation mark before the number.

Syncing Entries

From this point forward your form entries will be written to the Google Spreadsheet whenever a member enters their data on the form.    

If your form already has entries on it you can use the Sync Entries button to write them to the spreadsheet.  Please be aware of the note below, syncing the entries a second time will result ALL of the entries being appended to the spreadsheet a second time.  

Lastly, if you delete entries from the Gravity Form the are not removed from the  Google Spreadsheet automatically. Any entry you manually removed from the  Gravity Form Entries screen must be manually removed from the  Google Spreadsheet.  .  

Conditional Sync

You can also choose to only write certain entries to the Google Spreadsheet. Currently only certain field types are supported so you likely won't be able to base the conditions an any possible field in the form but we're adding support for more condition types steadily.

Spreadsheet Sharing

One of the big advantages to Google Spreadsheets is the ability to share spreadsheets with multiple people and grant them varying levels of access, from read only to full editing privileges. Member Splash' integration allows you to view who has access to a spreadsheet directly from the Feed settings screen (our Google account always does). You can also share the spreadsheet with other people from that screen though at present it will give them full editing access. If you would like to grant read only access you'll want to do that from the spreadsheet itself using the Share button.

On a different but related topic: If you are using a form to bill members please remember that an authorize.net feed must be set up for each form implemented, see Authorize.net Integration