Purpose of limiting choices in Google Forms
Google Forms is great for so many different purposes including collecting responses,
submitting surveys or for using as quizzes, but what if you want to limit the number of responses for a particular question or a particular answer, well, that's exactly what we're going to address in today's video. Hello, everyone.
Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity helping you to get more done, and enjoy less stress. And in this example, I have a course signup, and one of my questions is that I'm going to be asking my participants, "Which session will you be attending?" And I've given them four different dates, but here's the catch.
I want to limit the answers for these particular dates. For example, once three people have signed up for May 4th, I don't want to give this option anymore.
I want to force other participants after this is filled to only see the other three options, and maybe I want to give different limits depending on the answer.
How to install the Choice Limit add-on
So how do we accomplish this? Well, with the addition of a Google Forms add-ons.
Here you can see in the top right-hand corner, I've got a little puzzle piece, which signifies that I have the Choice Limit Add-On installed. However, if you don't have any add-ons installed, you won't this icon.
So how can we make use of add-ons and extensions right here within Google Forms? Well, we want to start with the more option here, and come all the way down to the bottom, and select add-ons. And yes.
Just like how Gmail has extensions, and Google Chrome has extensions, Google Forms has extensions as well. So you can see a large variety of different extensions which we can add.
Now in our case, I want you to type in the word limit or choice limit, and you're going to get to the one that we're after. Yes. Choice limit. It's the second one here. And here you can see, I already have it installed. So now that I have
the Choice Limit Add On installed, I'm going to come back to this add-on option.
I'm going to choose that particular add-on. Remember, you may have others listed here as well. And all I have to do is select start, and what that's going to do. It's going to overlay my screen with a few more options here in the bottom right-hand corner.
Editing the choice limit options
Now I can start to apply some of these settings to my particular form. So right off the bat, you will see that it actually lists the different questions that I have in my form.
And yes. If you have a large number of questions, they will all be listed here as well.
But you can see that my second question is just a short answer question. So it's not really going to be applicable for this add-on because we need to be using either a dropdown, checkbox, or a radio button such as in my case here.
So any of those three will work with this add-on. So in this case, what I want to do is I want to determine if I want to make a number limit or a value limit. Now, in order to enable a value limit, you're going to have to connect a worksheet, a spreadsheet in order to make this happen.
So in most cases, we're going to make use of the number limit because the value limit is a little more complex, and I don't think it's necessary
for within Google Forms. Now, the next choice that we have to make is whether we want a generic limit or an individual limit. If I select generic limit, what it's going to do,
it's going to limit all choices by a certain number. So let's say for example, I want to have three in each of these sessions. Well, I would just select the number three,
and it's going to limit all of these options to only three. But if I want to be a little more specific I can choose the individual limit. And here you can see all four of my choices are listed. So maybe I only want to have two in the May 4th session. Maybe I've got a little more space in the May 5th and 6th,but I only have two in my last session as well.
So you can be as specific as you want here. Either for each actual answer, or you can choose just the same number for all of your answers here. The last thing that we need to do in order to enable this add-on, and enable these limits is to toggle the little radio button here at the bottom.
You can see by default, it's going to be turned off when you first install, and when you first choose the choice limit add-on
but here I'm going to say, "Yeah, let's turn that on." It's now telling me that the number limit is on. The last thing that I'm going to do for you
What users will see when using the form
is show you exactly what people will experience to see if this is the right extension for you. So now that the number limit is on, let's go ahead and book two sessions on May 4th, and see what happens.
So I'm going to the preview button here, which is essentially the same thing as working and dealing with the live form itself. And let's say, I'm the first participant. And I'm going to say, "Yeah, I want to participate in May 4th." I'm going to hit submit.
Perfect. I've been signed up in this case. Let's go back to our form. You can see that first response has been recorded. And let's say I'm now a different participant. And yeah, I also want to go to the May 4th session.
So I'm going to hit submit as well. Let's go back to our form, and you can see that two responses
have now been collected, but look what has changed. "Which session will you be attending?" Now May 4th is no longer an option. It's doing exactly what we want it to do by limiting those sessions to just two. If I go back to the preview one more time,
you can see that the next participant doesn't even know that May 4th is an option.
They will only have the other three options here or if they start to fill up, maybe it will be reduced to just
Additional limit features and options
one or two options. Now, if you need to make adjustments to your settings,
you can always come back into this dialogue box and either select reset where you can change all of the numbers, and reset to zero. Or you can toggle the numbers individually here as well.
And if you need to turn off the limiter, you can come down here to the toggle, and simply select this, which will turn the limiter off for this particular form. Also keep in mind.
Under the settings option, you can choose if you want to be notified when that is reached. This can be very helpful to keep you on top of how many people are using that form, and what are they selecting, and what is no longer available to them as well.
Now, if you enjoy this video, be sure to let me know
in the comments down below. And if you have other Google Forms questions, I'd love to hear from you.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
