Why a Pre-filled link?

Here's why:

• For the question "Homeroom," Jack answered, "5a." Earl answered, "Mrs. Smith." Ima answered, "Miss Smith." Orson answered, "5th."
• The form dumps the answers into a spreadsheet. When I alphabetize the "Homeroom" column with this data, what will I get? Nothing useful.
• Let's say I want to use autoCrat to merge student's responses into a document and automatically send it home, attached to an email. But when they fill in the form, some students don't remember their parent's email, and what's worse, some will just guess.
• If I take some time to prepare a link to a pre-filled form, I'll get much better results. I'll be able to sort the columns in whatever order is helpful. Most importantly, when I use autoCrat, the parents will actually get the email.

I use this for:

• progress reports sent to parents
• score sheets/rubrics sent to students
• form for students to sign up for elective courses, with their choices emailed to parents for approval
• professional development sessions for teachers, with emailed certificates
• teachers submitting reports of infractions, with an email sent to homeroom teacher, parent or both
• I even use it for lesson plans! The merged lesson plans will be stored in a designated folder in the Google drive that I can share with an administrator or a co-teacher.

This is the first and most important step!

• Get or create a Google sheet with accurate data. This might be available as an exported CSV from your grade program, or you may have been given a spreadsheet of students with parent email address, etc. Upload to your Google drive. This sheet is going to be linked to your form.
• Is the exported information not in the correct form? Don't retype! Try these formulas and tools for Google Sheets.
• Your spreadsheet will have 2 sheets: "Form Responses," and "Sheet1" –or whatever is the name of your sheet with accurate data.
• Here's a sample data sheet. The data is on Sheet1.
• autoCrat works great, but it will get it's data from either Form Responses or Sheet1--it can't bounce back & forth between the two. The purpose of the pre-filled link is to add the data from Sheet1 to Form Responses, where it will be merged into a document.