How Google Docs Can Help Your Wedding Planning

As I have been going through wedding planning, one of the things I was dreading was gathering addresses from friends and family. Several of my friends have gotten married recently, and they had a difficult time getting timely responses so they could send their invites out.

My fiance and I, though, discovered a handy tool within Google docs that allowed us to gather addresses rather painlessly. We actually got emailed out to about 100 people and got back about 75 responses within a week! The tool is called Google Form, and it allows people to send you a response that gets stored into a Google Spreadsheet. Here's how you can use Google to help gather addresses for your wedding or other event!

1. Sign into Google. If you don't have a Google account, you can sign up for one for free.

2. Once signed in, use the menu at the top to find "Documents." This may be under the menu labeled "More."

3. Documents opens in a new window or tab. Just under the Google Docs logo, there is a menu. Click "New" and scroll down to "Form."

4. This again opens in a new window. The first box is the header or subject of your form. You put "Addresses for Our Wedding" or something similar. It's really just to let people know what this thing is.

5. The second box is so you can write a little message to your potential guests and give a little more instruction.

6. Next you should see an area highlighted in yellow. This is where you can setup your form questions. For the first question, we just put "Name: ". Help text is to give an example of what to write. We left this blank. You leave the question type just as text, and make sure to check the box to make the question required.

7. Click "Done" and move on to the next question. You may need to click on the button that looks like a pencil to edit the second question.

8. Once you are done with your form, you can customize it some. Click on "Theme: Plain" to change the theme to your liking. Also, if you click on "More Actions", you can change the confirmation message someone would get if they submitted information. This is really just a thank you message.

Now that your form is done, you can email it out to people or embed it on a web page. What we did, though, was emailed it to ourselves (you'll get an email anyway from Google) to check to see if everything was working. You can use that link and email it out to your friends and relatives. The link opens up to a new page (with the theme you chose) where people can enter their information and submit it for a quick response, saving you time to plan all the other stuff for the wedding!