Streamlining a Google Form

This morning I received a Google Form to fill out regarding the platforms we teachers are using. It is a standard form. I did an entire screen grab, and as you can see, it is pretty long.

Zooming in a little, I noticed many of the questions are about the grade you teach. 

To begin, the Form doesn't ask for a name, so I can skip 

 to grade. I wanted to make it a radial question (multiple choice) but some teachers teach multiple grades. So, this question will need to be checkboxes.

Again, teachers use multiple platforms. I might even add an "other" option here.  But let's try it the way it is, and we can edit it later.

To make a long post short (or I'll never finish this post I started months ago), when making a Form or survey, it is better to try to group the big ideas together and use the filtering options in Google Sheets. This can make the Form much shorter for the users.

CHOOSECOLS

I have been putting together a data dashboard for my school for two years, and you'd think I would have had this figured out by now, but I didn't - the grades 1-12 all work out fine and sort nicely, but when I add in our early years classes (KB, KA, PS) those aren't recognized as number so they are put at the end of the list, after Grade 12; not in front of grade 1 where they should naturally reside.

Not knowing how to solve this effectively, I turned to ChatGPT to help me out. 

It suggested I make a helper column, I called it "hidden", and label each grade with its own grade, since the numbers were not a problem, and we needed to convert the "KB", KA, and "PS" text to a numerical value to rank them against other numbers.

I gave them -3 for PS, -2 for KA, and -1 for KB. 

I then used this formula to make the grade for each grade. It reads column B and rewrites the grade in column D for me.

Then I wanted another table with everything sorted. I would have used QUERY, but ChatGPT suggested I use CHOOSECOLS. The reason it said was that QUERY is used to search a database, whereas CHOOSECOLS creates a new array from the selected columns in the existing range.

That was kind of cool - I'd never used that formula before. 

The documentation shows it being used to manipulate data in an already-made table.

Keep a Contact List in a Doc Updated Using Google Sheets

The other day, I was reading our Teacher Handbook. The Teacher Handbook includes names of teachers and what they teach. The problem is that one teacher had changed positions and so the handbook was out of date.

This video shows how to keep documents updated by maintaining a single spreadsheet.