In Which Jenn Breaks Google Forms, and Creates An Ongoing Poll

Google Forms is awesome. It recently got even more awesome by allowing you to use "logic-branching", which I found out from reading help documentation means "turn your poll into a Choose Your Own Adventure story".

I've been using it at work to develop a scheduling database for all the programs we run during the summer (I work for a place that runs summer programs for international scholars), and as with so many other things in my life, learning about Google Forms and its near-endless possibilities for data collection made me think of dolls, and how many conventions we're trying to go to, and how handy it would be to have some idea of what people in different regions are into. So, I've built a form, and you can access it from a shiny new link on the right hand side of this here blog (at least, as of this post's press-time. I can't say it will still be there In The Future.)

Meanwhile, one of my co-workers found a bug in the form I'd made for my day job. That's fine - her job was to see what the form was lacking. Apparently, if you go through a couple of pages on a multi-page form, then realize you made a mistake, use the form's "Back" button to backtrack, and then change an answer? The form breaks. It tells you that you can't continue because you've forgotten to enter a required answer, even though you can plainly see that the fields are all filled in. Emptying the fields and starting over again also does not work.

So I went to the internet to seek help. The problem was with the form's back button, which I can't even access during the editing, so maybe there's a trouble ticket or helpful blog about this. After half an hour of trying every combination of "back button changing answer breaks Google forms cannot continue please help" that I could imagine, I concluded that I must be the first person on the entire Internet to have this problem. That's thrilling and awesome, except for the part where it doesn't actually solve anything.

So I submitted a question to Google's help forums, and we'll see what shakes out, but how cool is that?! I broke Google Forms! I'm a pioneer!

 - Jenn

EDIT: I'm a bit of an idiot. I wrote the whole form in my voice, so pardon the crazy I/we/she/he pronoun mambo that happened as I tried to correct for the fact that ALL of us will be using the info provided. If it says "I", it means "Jenn." As you were!