Google Forms Limitations

With Google Forms, you can create a web and mobile-friendly data entry form easily, with validations.

This allows the non-technical user’– a big win. Don't let IT be the bottleneck to getting your work done. Of course, as you’ll see below, Google forms are not entirely the land of milk and honey.

Any data entered typically goes into a Google spreadsheet for easy batch processing. You can limit use of the form to our domain, too.

Here are some ways that Google forms can be used to eliminate manual re-keying of data:

Event RSVPs
Contact forms
Order forms
Transaction reporting

Google forms are extremely flexible but do have some limitations. Some limitations and issues are:

If you post to a Google spreadsheet, the typical use case, you are bound by spreadsheet limits: See limits on Google Sheets here
You can’t host the form on your domain. The best solution to this issue is to have IT do a URL redirect of a domain name. For example, from someform.eoiservice.com to the Google form URL. This lets you replace the form while still sending people to the same URL.
You can’t have a form email an arbitrary address on submission without custom code.
Multi page forms are possible but can get clunky if not done well.
Validation is limited, though using regular expressions gives you a fair bit of power (but then takes form creation/maintenance out of the realm of the non developer).
UI customization is limited. A Google form will always look like a Google form. It will always have the ‘powered by Google forms’ link, the same ‘response received’ page, and the same handling of closed forms (an unmodifiable message from Google, with no way to customize it).
Option lists are static (though if you use formRanger, you can alleviate this issue).
File uploads are limited as well.

As alluded to above, you can use Google Apps Script to alleviate some of the issues with Google forms. However, doing so pushes the maintenance of that form into IT/developer land (or at least ‘power user’ land).

Even with all the limitations, Google forms is still a powerful tool. If you or anyone in your team is currently doing manual data re-entry, and the limits above haven’t scared you away, I’d take a long hard serious look at Google forms.