It’s easy to see how this can quickly become problematic. Not all people are equally capable of following instructions well, which can make it harder to quickly interpret the responses you’ve received and increase your workload. This is where response validation can help.
What Is Response Validation?
Response validation is a set of rules that restrict the type of responses that can be filled into a certain field based on some criteria. You can use this feature without the need to install any Google Forms add-ons.
For instance, if you have a field to collect the expected monthly salary in your Google Form, you could restrict the responses to numbers only. Doing this will allow you to collect richer information rather and keep applicants from writing an essay about why they expect a certain amount of salary.
How to Set Up Response Validation
Start by creating a Google Form. Once you’ve created a form, you’ll be able to start adding elements to the form. Response validation is available for three of these elements:
Short answer Paragraph Checkboxes
Once you’ve added either of the three elements into your Google Form, click on the ellipsis at the bottom-right and select Response validation.
Next, you’ll see a new drop-down appear at the bottom-left. The items in this menu differ based on the element you’ve selected. Finally, toggle the Required button to make validated responses compulsory.
Let’s talk about what types of responses you can validate on a Google Form.
Validating Text, Email, or URL
You can validate a text response based on the inclusion or exclusion of a text string, a correctly formatted email address, or a URL.
You can use Contains for a quiz where the response needs to include a certain word or phrase. If you choose Contains, you’ll also need to enter the required text in the next field.
However, the handiest of the four are the Email and URL options. They’re great options when you need someone’s email address in the correct format or a URL to an applicant’s portfolio, for example.
For any of these options, you can enter a Custom error text that will appear when a response is unacceptable.
Validate Numbers
You can validate numbers only for Short Paragraph elements. Do this by selecting Number, selecting the validation criteria, and entering a number.
For instance, if you’re asking respondents to enter the number of projects they can handle at a time, you can validate responses that are less than 5 to ensure none of the responses are 5 or greater.
Validating the Length of Input
You can validate the length of the response for Short Paragraph and Paragraph elements on a Google Form by selecting Length and prescribing a minimum or maximum character count.
Choose the relevant option and prescribe a character count in the Number field. For instance, if you’re asking someone to add a pin code, you might want to prescribe a minimum character count of 5.
Validating Number of Checked Boxes
If you’re using Checkbox elements on your Google Form, you can require respondents to check a minimum, maximum, or a specific number of boxes.
Choose validation criteria and enter a number. For instance, if you’ve asked a question that has at least two correct answers, you can require the respondents to select at least two boxes.
Validate Regular Expressions
The regular expression option works similarly to the text option. With regular expression, you can validate answers based on a certain pattern, unlike the Text option where you could validate answers based on a specific text string.
For instance, with the Text option you could validate answers that contained the text string “United States”, but with regular expression, you can validate answers that start with the letter U and end with the letter S. To do this, you must select Regular expression, then select Contains, and then enter U*S as the pattern.
There’s a lot more you can do with the regular option, though. You’ll find a complete list of expressions on the Docs Editor Help page.
Responses, Validated
Google Forms offers plenty of value for students, academics, and professionals. Validating responses can go a long way in dodging the headache that comes with skimming through a big pile of responses that don’t make a lot of sense.
Validation helps bring uniformity in responses and makes your life easier when you finally sit to scan through them. It’s not just Google Forms where you can use validation, though. Validation is also a handy feature on Microsoft Excel (Data Validation).
