Have you ever faced the situation that you would like to collect responses from a group of people and collate it into a spreadsheet? Have you wondered if there was an easier way to do than mailing the spreadsheet across to all these users and requesting each one to fill in his response (without overwriting other people's changes and versions!)?

The forms feature in Live Spreadsheets allows you to solicit inputs from any number of users without any manual effort or confusion. What's more, if you so choose, you can even restrict users from seeing the actual spreadsheet itself.

Create a form in a Live spreadsheet and publish it as widget or as a complete web page. Send out the link to the form to anyone with an email address. They won't need to sign in (unless you want them to), and they can respond directly without opening the spreadsheet..

Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet.

You can apply workflow rules to create powerful business applications on top of forms input. For instance, you can automatically send out email notifications when new form entries are added or you can create "mail-merge" type of capabilities that are triggered on form inputs.