In this article we will show you how to make an anonymous google form in just a few clicks. Simply follow the steps below.
By default, Google Forms gather data on the people who have responded to a form. However, Google forms has various settings that allow you to reduce identifying information and make the forms more anonymous.
To create a new form, visit Google Forms at https://forms.new . You will see the following page:
Build your form by adding questions. To do so, click the Add question icon on the top portion of the floating box on the right side of the form.
The question formats you use depend on the purpose of the form. To change it, click the drop-down list beside the question title. For our example, we are creating an anonymous service satisfaction form. We will have a series of criteria and the customer rates us on each of these. For this we will select the Multiple choice grid format.
Screencap of this step:
We get a column for setting the Rows and the Columns. The Rows are for the questions while the Columns are for the choices.
Here is what we got in our example:
In the process, ensure that no identifying information, such as name, contact numbers, and even transaction reference numbers are included in the form.
There are more settings we need to check and change to make the form anonymous. Click the Settings tab above the form.
You will be able to see the different form settings here.
Screencap of this step:
We need to disable the Collect email addresses option in our form. If this is enabled, Google Forms will ask the user to sign in their Google accounts so the form no longer becomes anonymous.
To check whether this setting is enabled or not, find the Responses label, and click the arrow on its right.
The list of Response settings will appear. Check the drop-down box besides the Collect email address. It should be Do not collect. If it is not the selected setting, click it, then select Do not collect.
For our example, it is already set to Do not collect, so we do not need to change it.
Another setting to check is the Allow response editing setting. It should be toggled off; this is because it can only be enabled when the Google Forms is set to collect email addresses.
You are now done! Check how the Google Form looks by clicking the Preview icon on the upper-right of the page.
A new tab will appear containing the preview of the form. Since you are logged in, your email address will still be detected. However, a caption Not shared will appear below it. It says that the form will not collect the Google account logged into your browser.
You can check your form is working correctly by submitting a dummy response. Afterwards, go back to the Google Forms tab, then click the Responses tab. The list of responses to the form will appear. Click Link to Sheets. This will generate a Google Sheets listing all the responses to the form.
Select Create a new spreadsheet. You can set a title for the spreadsheet; for our example, we won’t change it. After you set the title, click Create.
A new tab will appear containing the generated Google Sheets containing the form. As you will see, not even the email address is stored in the sheet!
A Google Form is anonymous if:
As long as the form does not ask the user to log in to their Google accounts or give any information that can identify them, the form is sufficiently anonymous.
No. An anonymous Google Form does not store any information that can be used to identify the user who made the specific response.
We hope you now have a better understanding of how to make google forms anonymous and will be able to apply it your own forms. If you enjoyed this article, you might also like our article on how to check submitted Google Forms and how export Google Forms to Excel.
We also suggest checking out our article on how to make Google Forms send a confirmation email.
