Every response, one row at a time.

Connect a Google account and create a linked spreadsheet for each survey. Completed responses are added as rows after submission, with readable answer labels in question order.

Pro. The link stays if a workspace drops to Free, but rows stop being added.

01Connect the Google account

In the builder, open Settings → Delivery and choose Connect Google account on the Google Sheets card. The token is held for the workspace, so one connection covers every survey in it and you do not repeat this per survey. Authorisation is per workspace and revoking it in your Google account settings stops every sync immediately.

02Create the linked sheet

Choose Create & link a Google Sheet. Plumeform creates a new spreadsheet in the connected account, with one tab named Responses, links it to the survey and turns sync on. It cannot link a spreadsheet you already have, because the permission it asks Google for covers only the files it creates. The header row is written once, when the sheet is created: Submitted at first, then one column per question in survey order. Keep the sheet’s own formulas in columns to the right of the data, not inside it.

03Send a response and check the row

Publish the survey, open its live share link, and submit one real answer. Builder previews do not save responses or send a row. The row appends within seconds of submission, out of band, so it never delays the respondent; when many responses arrive at once they go to the sheet together. Test responses (?test=1) are deliberately excluded, along with partials and screened-out responses: only a completed, non-test response produces a row.

04Know what a cell will contain

Answers are written the way a person reads them, not the way they are stored: a choice is its label, a checkbox question is its selected labels joined together, a rating is its number, a matrix row is its chosen column, an address is one line with the country named, and a slider value carries its unit. That makes the sheet useful to somebody who never saw the builder. Labels come from the published version that collected each response. Renaming an option and publishing again changes future rows; rows already written to the sheet stay as they are.

05Start a new sheet after changing questions

The header row is not updated after the sheet is created. Each new row follows the question order of the published version that collected it, so adding, removing or reordering questions and publishing again puts later rows out of line with the header and with earlier rows. After a change like that, unlink the sheet and create a new linked one, and use a CSV export to analyse responses across versions.

If rows stop arriving

Plumeform saves the response before it sends the row. When Google is briefly unavailable or turns away a burst of writes, the rows wait in a queue and are sent again, with longer gaps between tries, for up to about three hours. Rows are not retried when Google access was revoked or the spreadsheet was deleted. Either way, the responses stay saved and can be exported from Results.

The two failures worth knowing: revoking Google access stops rows without touching the survey, and dropping from Pro to Free keeps the spreadsheet linked but stops the sync. If rows stop arriving, reconnect Google under Settings → Delivery, and create a new linked sheet if the old one was deleted.

Sync limits

Sync runs from Plumeform to Google Sheets. Sheet edits and formulas do not update responses in Plumeform. Responses collected before you linked the sheet are not added automatically; export and paste them if needed.

Use a webhook to notify your own system about new responses, or the Results API to fetch response history on a schedule.