When Google Spreadsheets first added its forms feature, I wrote about using an iframe to embed a poll on your website and the post has been consistently popular. I’ve found myself using more and more spreadsheet polls in the year since that post so it’s time to check out what improvements have been made to the service.

Form Customisation

You can now tweak the colours and font of the form by changing the URL parameters of your embedded iframe, so you can make the form match the colour scheme of your blog.

The Google Operating System blog points out that you don’t have to use Google to host the forms, just copy the code and host them yourself and you can style them however you want and add javascript for validation and the results will still end up in the spreadsheet.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this.

Hide The Thank You Page

In my original post, my biggest complaint was that the page that thanks the user for filling out the form is not very customisable - a redirect to a graph of responses would be really useful.

That issue has not been addressed but it is possible to avoid showing the thank-you page altogther by specifying another iframe (with height 0), as Copasetic Flow discovered.

More Embedding

You can embed forms into Google Knols as described here.

BetchaBlog also point out that you can create and embed Google Maps from spreadsheets as well as loads of other types of Google Gadgets. Wordpress users might be interested in this plugin to widgetize gadgets.

Good Progress

Google Spreadsheets are definitely growing into a useful tool and their ability to synchronise with RSS and web queries promises to make them into a very powerful tool indeed. In fact, I am surprised that more people are not using them with tools like Yahoo Pipes to create quick and simple mashups. I’m looking forward to seeing what further improvements are made over the next year.

I note that Stack Overflow used used a spreadsheet to handle sign ups for their beta, which is an excellent use of the technology to save development time.

And this pie chart by Kim Woodbridge, which uses Twitter to populate a spreadsheet is very cool. Leave a comment if you’ve seen any other interesting mashups involving spreadsheets, I’d love to see them.

Also, if you follow me on twitter, please take my latest poll.