Google Forms Finally Become Useful Thanks To Properly Formatted Date And Time Fields

Google Docs, now Drive, have always had an option to create forms that would drop data right into a spreadsheet. This is super handy until you tried to do something like…collect date and time information.

For whatever reason, those structured fields were never an option with Forms, but the team has finally added both as an option today. The product has always been “there,” but not heavily promoted by Google. Mostly because of these types of limitations.

Asking a simple question like when someone’s birthday was a nightmare, as you couldn’t normalize and structure being dropped into the spreadsheet, making the form pretty useless. It’s good to see the option when creating a form now:

For dates, people filling out your form will now get a proper calendar picker:

The folks in your office who have to actually use the data that you collect with a survey can now breathe a sigh of release with properly formatted dates and times. It’s the little things that matter. Or in this case, the big things that made the product pretty useless until now.

[Photo credit: Flickr]