I have a long form for users to answer survey questions with about 20 pages. It's long enough that users may want to stop and finish the survey later, or they may abandon the survey altogether half way through. How can I:
cause the answers on each page to be saved to a spreadsheet when the user clicks the continue button to move to the next page?
OR
Add the option for the user to save their responses and complete the survey later?
Google doesn't currently support this feature - there is no way to save a form and have a user return to it later without submitting it.
That does raise an interesting point, though. You can have the user submit the survey and edit their responses later. Instead of forcing the user to page through the rest of the survey to get to the submit button, just add a multiple choice question at the bottom of each survey page (see example below):
By using question logic, we can send survey-takers to the "Submit form" page which then gives them an "Edit this form" link that they'll need to save. Of course, when they come back, they will be starting from the beginning of the survey, but their previous answers will remain filled in.
If this all seems complicated (it is), you may want to try one of the paid survey services (I found SurveyMonkey to be a good value for the money, at least a few years ago), which make implementing this much easier (see SurveyMonkey info here).
What I have tried and think is going to work is to have my students submit responses (I can't make any of the questions required) but I think the students know if the question is there they need to complete. I made sure to mark the students can edit responses on the form. Then, after the students submit, I had them save the url (bookmark, send to themselves via email,) and when they open that link later it will allow the student to edit and continue. Haven't yet done it with the whole class, but my Beta effort looks promising.
The edit their responses later suggested by Jordan Anderson above works well, on the surface. I hit a problem when I had various sections in the form.
A user completes all sections 1,2,3 then submits the form. They come back via the edit link that was sent to them by email (why can't this be available to admins by default?!) and edit section 2, re-submit the form. Answers in section 3 are gone. Doh!
I got around this by removing sections completely, and that does the job.
Tim's answer is spot on and this is a huge flaw within Forms right now. Edit response is perfect to get users back into their previously submitted form. Question logic works beautifully to allow users to pick up where they left off and to "save" their progress by jumping to the submit page from anywhere. However as stated, when the user returns, makes progress and resubmits, answers from any previously completed section are lost.
I attempted to create a loop where in order to submit you actually have to revisit every section in the form first (because if you navigate to a previously completed section before submitting, it will maintain those answers). In theory, this sounded nice, but it became so complicated for a user to submit, that it wasn't worth even using a Form. In addition, I kept running into closed loops that would send me from section 1 to section 2 and then back to section 1 and I would get stuck in that loop. Super frustrating!
To my knowledge, the only workaround is to not use sections, which then makes you unable to "jump" around throughout the form...
My take away - Google Forms is not the right tool for the application, so I'm on to another option.
If questions are not very related to each other and the form is anonymous, or the form gets submitted not so often, so you can track its submission by time, then you may split your form into 20 separate forms, each one linking to the next one at the end. So when user fills the first answer, they submit the first form, and they see the link to a second form, and so on. And you will can later track them by the time when they're submitting. In my case, this works for me - maybe my answer will help someone.
I found a way to "save" Google forms. It's sort of a long process, but goes like this:
Create the form, create a Google sheet that will act as the 'saveable' form with the form's questions in one column and a place for them to answer somewhere else on the form, the form also needs a place for the numbers that correspond to the prefilled url that Google forms can generate, it's hard to explain see example at end of post. On the form you use the concatenate to generate a prefilled url, now the user can fill out part of the form on Monday, come back and fill out the rest on Tuesday and submit on Friday.
Example
