Google Sheets – View and Edit Data in a Form

google sheets

Question:
Is there any way to view and edit data in Google Spreadsheets in a form, like Microsoft Access or OpenOffice Base can do that? It would be perfect if you could cycle through each record, which would be the respective row in Spreadsheets. I've heard that you can include an HTML UI into Spreadsheets via Script. Would that be a possible approach?

Background:

I'm working on a seniors book in a group for my school and want to enter students data, e.g. name, birthday, favourite movie etc. Because we have over 150 students, it would take ages if only one person has to enter in all the data. I want to create a cloud-based solution in which everyone who is working for the seniors book can enter student data via an user-friendly form which can be accessed via browser. If there is some data missing from a student yet, we could easily edit it later on by using the form. Eventually, we would export all the data as .csv

Best Answer

At this time, Google docs editors don't include a built-in feature but you could extend them through add-ons and Google Apps Script. But someone already did the hard work for us and developed a free Google Gadget that work together with Google Apps Script to use

  • Google Forms as the UI for creating and editing records
  • Google Sheets for storing records
  • Google Gadgets as the list/search UI

From Awesome Tables

The "Awesome Tables" gadget can be used to create a table from a spreadsheet and add interactive controls to manipulate the data it displays. It is not an Apps Script web app but a Google Gadget and it uses the Google Visualization API.

From Awesome Table and Google Form

Awesome Table is mainly used to display data in multiple ways. But it can also be very useful to let your users edit the data displayed. Here's how to do it, using Google Forms : see the documentation (or take a look at the spreadsheet).

If you try it, note that the changes you'll make can take a minute before being displayed on the site.

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