Get the Form

You’ll need the form made for use with School Announcements Easy.

By clicking on the link at the end of this section, you’ll be offered a copy of the Google form. Once you have the form, save it in your drive folder. You will likely want to edit the form for your organization. We’ll talk about that next.

Get the Form for School Announcements Easy

Edit the Form

The form is broken into three sections. Each section is visible while the user is filling it out; other sections are hidden. In editing mode you can see the whole form.

Each question, blank, and drop down is a required part of this form that produces data the Add-on needs to work. Here are the things you should edit:

  1. Password: This is set to schoolPassword by default, along with a message of That’s not right! for erroneous entries. You can change both of these.
  2. Categories: Categories are used to organize content. The categories used are those from a particular school environment. The numbers are used to put the content in order, but aren’t seen in the final bulletin. You can change the category names, but leave the numbers, as they are used to put the content in order.
  3. Bulletin Text Character Limit. Currently set to 500 characters, you can make this number whatever you like, or get rid of it altogether.
  4. Click on the Settings link (looks like a gear in a machine, but don’t we all?). You may wish to change general settings regarding receipts, sign-in, and editing privileges.

Connect the form to a sheet

  1. At the top of the form, click “RESPONSES” (next to “QUESTIONS”).
  2. Click on the green Sheets icon to create a new sheet to connect to.

Get the Add-on

  1. You may have already done this, but go to the Add-ons store in Google Sheets, or use this link.
  2. Check out the Setup sidebar available from School Announcements Easy in the Add-ons menu. If you plan to use birthdays, there is a button for setting up the Birthdays sheet.
  3. Be sure that the sheet fed by the form is called Form Responses (exactly like that, case specific).

Share the Form

  1. Click on the SEND button.
  2. Fast Admin does not recommend using email for this most of the time, but it may be useful the first time, especially if you are informing your organization of the new protocol and password.
  3. The link button allows the link to be grabbed and used in your web page or email.
  4. The < > button gets embed code if you’d simply like to embed the form in a page on your organization’s site.
  5. You can also adjust the color palette to match your organization’s color scheme.

Try It Out

  1. Use the form to enter some test entries into your sheet.
  2. If you plan to use birthdays, enter some placeholders on the Birthdays sheet. Use dates that match the test entries in the previous step.
  3. In your Announcements Spreadsheet, open the SAE sidebar from the Add-ons menu.
  4. Try out the Create Bulletin button to make a test bulletin. Remember, the Create Bulletins function lets you decide what content to include by date,  as well as include or exclude the Pledge of Allegiance, Quote of the Day, or Birthdays.
  5. Try removing old bulletin sheets or old entries.
  6. Anything you do can be undone with undo/redo buttons or keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-z/Ctrl-y).