Tips
Do:
- When you're ready to send emails with autoCrat, make sure you have a fast Internet connection. Consider connecting the ethernet cable.
- Test the process. Answer the form yourself, then email a merged doc to yourself.
- Copy the exact form question to put into your template. Capitalization counts.
- Make the template look nice. Add your school logo. You might even mimic the official letterhead.
- Save your form and spreadsheet after the job is done. You can use the successful autoCrat job to help you with the process next time. No, you can't just copy the job and paste. But you can copy the spreadsheet with the autoCrat script included--ha ha!
- Once the 4 columns autoCrat added are filled–Merged Doc ID, Doc Merge Status, etc.–autocrat will not merge the doc or send the email again for that row. If you need to resend, just delete the info in those columns for the rows you want to resend, then run autoCrat again. But don't delete the column!
- The purpose of pre-filling is to move the reliable information on Sheet1 into the Responses sheet. autoCrat will merge the data from Form Response. It can't bounce back & forth between the 2 sheets.
Don't:
- Don't close the tab while the autoCrat script is running. Step away from the keyboard! I don't ask the computer to do anything else while that process is going.
- Don't mess with "map the tags" in step 3 of autoCrat. Fix the template so that your placeholders inside the double "less than–greater than" signs are EXACTLY the same as the form question--case sensitive. That way autoCrat maps the tags for you.
- Don't delete any columns from your spreadsheet. If you have a question from the form that you don't want, just don't put it in the template. You can delete rows, but not columns.
- Don't worry that you're sending too many emails. The limit for educational accounts is 1,500 per day. If you get a message that seems to say you're limited, wait a bit and run the job again. autoCrat won't send emails to people who've already gotten one.
Below is the form I'm using as an example of this process. It is linked to the spreadsheet that holds the personal information.
Here's the spreadsheet that holds the data from the form. Sheet1 holds the data including name, homeroom, parent email address, student email address and anything else that I want to pre-fill into the form.
At the risk of repeating myself, anything you need from Sheet1 data MUST be one of the questions on the form, and MUST be pre-filled.
Form Responses 1 holds the information from the respondents.
(Copy of Sheet1 is just an example with the pre-filled links completed.)
Below is a sample template . Originally this was set up as a rubric. I entered my comments and scores on a form, then used autoCrat to email the merged doc to the student. Links to other templates are here–see step 2.
And there's More Resources.
