Ok, so this has a LOT of pictures, so I'm going to try to keep the text minimal so it's not really long! (And you can click on the pictures to make them bigger)
The other day at work (my real [part-time] job haha), I had to make a form, and it got me thinking about order forms for businesses. Pretty soon, I need to make some order forms to bring with me to the Maine State Firefighter's Convention where I'll be a vendor. I started thinking of Google Docs, which I haven't really used for much, but I know it can't be helpful. Even though it's actually not helpful for the order forms I need to make, and neither does it work well for my general store (
Storenvy works well for
me), I decided to play with it to see how well it might work for others :)
**To use Google Docs, you DO NEED a Gmail email account.** Personally, I prefer Gmail (my business and personal accounts are Gmail, plus my school email is hosted by Gmail) because it has practically unlimited email space (I've had my personal account for years, get tons of emails, delete nothing, and have only used 14%), it consolidates emails into "conversations" so all the RE:'s are together and easily looked at, and Google has many other programs to use with it (like Blogger!).
For an example, I made a form for my friend Jen at
Anchored Heart Designs, because I thought it would work well for her :)
So! To start off...
When you're in your Gmail inbox, across the top left it says "Documents" (it's 3rd on mine, I don't know if that changes). Click that. It brings you do a page that looks like this:
As you can see, I had already made the form here, but to make a new one, click "Create New" under the "Google docs" logo. It will give you a list of options - choose "Form" (I haven't played with the others much, I don't know what they can do). It will open a new window that looks like this:
Where it says "Untitled form" I put "Anchored Heart Designs Order Form" but you can put whatever you want. In the info, I copy and pasted the pricing info she had in a Note on Facebook. Once I added it, it looked like this:
Then, move on to the first question. You can set up questions in different ways - you can have the answer be one line of text, a paragraph, check boxes, drop down list, multiple choice, scale or grid (I don't know yet how the last two work). Most of the ones I used were just one line of text (Name, Email, etc.).
As you can see, there's a box you can check to make it a required question - this means they can't submit the form without putting something there. Your form starts out with two questions, but do you see where it says "Add Item" at the top with a drop down? You can click that to add more questions in different types - but you can change what type it is after it's added too. Here's some of the other types:
Checkbox: (I added Other, which is a separate button-thing, before I realized None was a better choice, but then just didn't delete it haha)
Here's how it looks to the customer on the form:
From a list:
Here's how it looks to the customer: (please ignore my cursors throughout... I was trying to quickly take all the screen shots so I didn't want to be a perfectionist haha)
Paragraph: (Notice the "Help Text" box...)
Here's how it looks to the customer: (ignore the box saying edit... I don't know why that showed up...)
See how the Help Text showed up? Pretty nifty, right?
**EDIT: I forgot to mention - it doesn't look like there's a way to move questions around, but if you forget to add one (like I forgot an Email question on this one) there's an option to "Duplicate" the question. It shows up right under the Q you duplicated, and then you can change it to whatever type and say whatever you want.**
Once you have everything filled out, you can view what your form looks like. Here's Anchored Heart Designs' with the Plain Theme:
You can change the theme by going back up to the top edit bar...
And click where it says Theme: Plain. It'll bring you to a page that looks like this:
Sadly, it doesn't look like you can upload your own picture to use as a theme, but there are 97 different preset ones, so I'm sure you can find one you like! Some of them change the format of the form and make it look a little different. Here are some examples:
Digital Theme
Glue Theme (the font is super small because I made it small so I could see more of the page at once)
So, once you're done with your form, you can post the link on your facebook page so people know they can order that way. Since the link it really long, I would use a link shortener like
Bitly. Bitly has a neat thing where if you add + to the end of the bitly URL, you can track the clicks on the link! Not really worth anything in this situation, but neat :)
Then, once people see it, they can start ordering...
Once they submit the form, they'll get a screen like this:
There are two ways you can view your results - Summary or Spreadsheet. I looked at Summary for the first time today, and it won't help in filling orders, but might be interesting for seeing statistics and how much of what types of orders you get. To see it you go back to the top edit bar...
Click "See Responses" and "Summary." It looks like this:
To view it as a spreadsheet, you can click "Spreadsheet" on the drop down, but it just brings you back to the main docs page:
Just click on the form and it will open a spreadsheet in a new window:
All the order information is in a nice organized manner! (I realized after I took all the pictures that an "Email" question was essential, and it was added after name, so it would show up here between name and type of item). And it has a time stamp, so if you have sales or anything that end at a certain time, it's easy to see when they all came in :)
Once you've completed the order, you can right click (or equivalent) on the row number on the left and select delete, so you can keep only open orders in this spreadsheet to make it easy peasy! Since I like to keep lots of information, especially order information, I would suggest creating an Excel document and copy and pasting the order there before deleting it. You can just highlight the boxes across, copy, and paste them into Excel - they'll separate out into their correct boxes (and the first time, there is a way to keep source formatting or whatnot on the little box that pops up, but I forget what the exact wording is right now).
If this seems to confusing, please let me know so I can try to make it easier to understand! I won't claim that I'm a Google Docs Guru, but I'd like to think I'm pretty tech savvy, and since being so is a big part of most of my jobs, I might be able to figure out any problems you have :) Please pass this post on to any small business friends you think it might help!
