Adding images, titles, text, and sections
Google Forms allows the addition of additional items to a form that don’t necessarily go with a question. You can add images (even animated gifs, though they are limited to 25 megabytes in size), YouTube videos, text headers, and break the form up into multiple pages/sections
Table of Contents:
- Adding images
- Adding videos
- Adding titles & descriptions
- Adding sections
- Jumping between sections
- Go to section based on answer
Adding images
To add an image to a Google Form, click on the image icon on the right side of the form:
A file selection window will pop up and offer you multiple ways to import an image into your form. I will insert it by URL:
Hit the “Select” button at the bottom to accept the image, and the image will now appear inside your form:
By clicking on the three dots that appear in the upper-left corner of the image, you can change the alignment (left, right or center), change the image, or remove the image (you can also click on the trash button on the upper-right corner).
You also can add “Hover text”, which is text that only shows up when the mouse cursor is “hovered” over the image when viewing it. To add hover text, click on the three dots in the upper-right corner and select “Hover text”:
This will bring up another line underneath the image title for you to write the text that will magically appear when the cursor is held over the final published image.
Here is what the hover text will look like in the final product:
I like to use this as a chance to hide jokes for only the most observant students who care about those sorts of things. Don’t put critical information that people HAVE to find in the hover text, as most people will not even notice it at all.
Adding videos
To add a YouTube video to the form, click on the YouTube icon that reads “Add video” on the right side of the screen:
You can either search for a video on YouTube, or paste your own direct link to a YouTube video:
You can resize the video by clicking on the thumbnail and dragging the blue square as needed.
You also can choose to change the alignment of the video by clicking on the three dots on the upper left corner of the video (when not selected)
Which bring up the same options as we saw earlier with images:
Adding titles and descriptions
On a particularly long form, you can also add in a title and a description that will break the form up a little bit while STILL keeping it on a single page. To add in a title or description, click on the “Tt” icon on the right side of the screen
Here is what it will look like on your end of the form:
This looks VERY different to how it will appear to anyone taking the form:
Adding Sections
To add a new section to the form, click on the “Add Section” icon on the right side:
It will now add a new section to the form. I highly recommend adding sensible, clear names for each section (“Lonesome George video” “Lonesome George image”, etc…) which will make more sense later on.
You may want to move some of the items/questions to/from the new section by dragging them with the six dots above each item, but I recommend collapsing the questions first (see below):
You can collapse the section by hitting the up/down carets, which will make moving the questions between sections much easier. Here is the bottom section BEFORE ‘collapsing’ (shrunk down):
Here it is AFTER collapsing. Note how much less room it will take on your screen (note, this WILL NOT affect what they see on their end - it just makes the organization easier for you):
More options are available when you click on the three dots on the upper-right-hand corner:
“Duplicate section” will duplicate literally everything that is in that section (questions, videos, images, etc.). This is a good way to duplicate several questions at the same time (since doing a manual copy of each one at a time can be cumbersome).
“Delete section” will delete and remove everything in that section (questions, videos, images, etc…)
“Merge with above” will delete the section (without deleting the contents) by moving everything in the section to the one above it.
If you select “Move section” a new window will pop up that will allow to reorder the sections up and down:
Here you can see how you can also click and drag to re-order the sections manually:
When someone is taking a form, the end of a section/page will show up as a “Back / Next” button:
Jumping between sections
You also may notice that when you add a new section, an option appears between sections:
If you click on the drop-down arrow, you are presented with several options:
If you have it default to skip a section (or submit the form), you can always override this by going to a section based on an answer (see below)
Go to section based on answer
In both Multiple Choice and Dropdown questions, there is an additional option called “Go to section based on answer”, which will allow people taking the form to go in different directions based on their choices.
When you select this, the multiple choice/dropdown questions will have a new option that appears on the screen.
Here it is BEFORE “Go to section based on answer” is selected:
And here it is AFTER you select “Go to section based on answer”:
When you click on the drop-down arrows on the right, you will have multiple options:
Until you have some sections actually built into your form, however, these options won’t do much for you. If you try this on a form with sections built in, you have more that you can do after each question:
Here is a form with a multiple choice question with 4 options, each resulting in a different “direction” for the form. This also shows you the importance in clearly naming your sections:
