You have a Google Form and you would like to send an auto-confirmation emails to the person as soon as they submit the form. The autoresponder email message can contain a custom note (like an acknowledgement saying that you have received their form entry) and also a copy of the form answers that that they have submitted.
These auto-responders are similar to canned responses in Gmail but for Google Forms. You may use the technique for sending welcome messages, acknowledge support requests, and more. Here’s a sample confirmation email that was sent through Google Forms:
A sample auto confirmation email sent through Google Forms
Send a Confirmation Email to the Form Submitter
The other day I got an email from N.Vamsi asking me how to send these confirmation emails using Google Forms?
Would you mind telling me how you have set up auto email updater for inputs taken from Google forms. I have seen your video tutorial on setting up Google forms and getting input values to an email address but auto email responder is something new! Do you have any tutorials for that as well?
This is easy and you can can add the auto-reply feature to your Google Forms in less than a minute. Here are the steps involved:
Create a new Google Form with one or more fields. You can also use an existing form but do make sure you have a field where you would be asking for the email address of the form respondent. This should be a mandatory field.
Install the Google Forms add-on, then go to the add-ons menu inside forms, choose Email Notification for Forms and select Create New Rule.
Enter your name, choose your Gmail alias that you wish to use for sending confirmation emails and check the “Notify Form Submitter” option. Select the form field that you are using to get the email address of the respondent.
On the next screen, customize the email subject and message as described in the Google Form Email tutorial.
Create the rule and you’re done. When anyone submits the Google Form, they’ll get an automatic confirmation email in HTML format and copy of the email data will also be cc’ed to you so you are in the loop.
An open-source Twitter bot that lets you easily set reminders for public tweets. Mention @RemindMe_OfThis in the reply of any tweet and specify the time in natural English when you would like to reminded of that tweet.
You could say things like in 2 days or in 12 hours or next week or even in 5 years. Check out the source on Github.
Save Twitter Threads with @ThreadReaderApp
The gurus on Twitter have figured out that threads are the best way to extend the reach of their tweets and @ThreadReaderApp makes is really easy for you read and save these threads.
To get started, reply to any tweet of a thread and mention @threadreaderapp with the “unroll” keyword. and they create a single page with all the tweets arranged in chronologicusefual order. Blog posts anyone?
Reply to a tweet with the word “screenshot this” and mention @pikaso_me in the reply. You’ll receive a reply tweet with a screenshot image of the original tweet.
The twitter bot capture images in tweets but you can also use Screenshot Guru for that.
Download Videos with @DownloaderBot
You can easily download any video or GIF image from tweets with the help of this Twitter bot.
Mention @DownloaderBot in a reply to any tweet that contains either a video or a gif image, and you will receive a reply with the direct link to download the media.
Twitter, like YouTube, may have a love-hate relationship with bots that allow downloading videos off their platform so it is always a good idea to bookmarks some alternatives. There’s @GetVideoBot, @SendVidBot and @Get_This_V.
When a user submits your Google Form, the response can be either saved in the Google Form itself or it can be written as a new row in a Google Spreadsheet. Multiple Google Forms can be associated with a single spreadsheet and their responses will be…
With Document Studio, you can specify a different reply-to email address for outgoing email message. When the recipient hits the “Reply” or “Reply All” button, the To field in their email reply gets populated with the email address that you’ve specified as the Reply-to email at the time of sending.
You can even specify more than one email addresses in the reply-to field, separated by commas, and they will all show up in the To field of the reply field.
The reply-to addresses can also be dynamic and can be based on data in your Google Sheets and Google Forms. For instance, if you have a question in your Google Form that asks the form respondent’s email address, that email can be set as the reply-to address.
Thus, when you reply to the email message, the reply will automatically go to the form respondent’s inbox.
Reply-to Email Address for Gmail
To get started, open your Google sheet, go to the add-ons menu and choose Document Studio. Next click on the Open menu to open the Document Studio sidebar. Expand the Mail Merge section and click on visual email editor.
This opens the visual email template designer. Specify the address(es) in the Reply-to addresses field as shown in the screenshot.
If you are specifying a dynamic field, enclose the question title (or the column header) inside double curly braces like {{Email Address}}.
Troubleshooting: Gmail may not always send replies to the email address specified in the reply-to field. See solution - Gmail ignores reply-to setting.
Google Images earlier offered a useful “search by size” option in advanced search to help you find logos, wallpapers and other images on the Internet by their exact size (or resolution).
For instance, you could limit your search for landscape photographs to image files that were at least 10 Megapixels in size. Or, if you are were using Google Image search to find wallpapers for the desktop, you could specify the image resolution as 1920x1080 pixels and Google would only return large images with those exact dimensions.
The “exact size” search option is no longer available in Google Image Search but you can still limit your image searches to a particular size by using the secret imagesize search operator in the query itself.
Here’s how.
Go to images.google.com and enter the search terms as before. Then append imagesize:WIDTHxHEIGHT to your query and hit Enter. Google Images will remove the operator from the query but the results will only display images that match the specified size.
The search by size operators works on the mobile version of Google as well so you may use the simple trick to find that perfect size wallpaper for your phone.
SlideCasts let you combine YouTube videos and Google Sides / PowerPoint presentations in a single-player. The speaker video and the slides appear side-by-side and, as the video progresses, the slides auto-change in sync with the video.
You can try a live demo of SlideCasts here. Just hit the play button on the YouTube video and you’ll notice that the slides will change at the 10s, 25s and 30s mark (configurable).
SlideCasts can be really useful for educators involved in remote teaching. The teacher’s “talking head” video can be uploaded to YouTube and the lecture slides can be hosted on Google Slides.
If your course slides are available as a PowerPoint presentation that will work as well since you can directly upload your PPT and PPTX files to Google Slides.
Go to the Addons menu inside Slides, choose Creator Studio and then select Create Slidecasts. Here specify the URL of the YouTube video and your Google Slides deck (both should be public).
Next, specify the timestamps in mm:ss format (minute seconds) when the slides should change in sync with the video.
For instance, if you want the second slide to show at the 15s point in the video, the 3rd slide at the 45s mark and the 4th slide at 1 minute, 20 second mark, your markers would be written as:
0, 15, 45, 1:20
That’s pretty much it. Click the Generate button and copy-paste the HTML code into your website.
The SlideCast player is responsive so the video and slides will auto-resize based on the size of the visitor’s screen.
There are three dates associated with any web page that is public on the Internet:
#1. The publication date - this is the date when an article or web page is first uploaded on to a public website where humans and search engines can find and access that page.
#2. The indexed date - this is the date when search engine spiders, like the Googlebot or the Bing Bot, first discover that web page on the Internet. Given the fact that Google has become so good at crawling fresh content, the date of first-crawl is often the same as the actual publication date (#1).
#3. The cache date - this is the date when a web page was last crawled by the Googlebot. Search engines often re-crawl web pages every few days or weeks, sometimes multiple times in a day in the case of news websites, to check if the content has been updated or changed.
Find the Publishing Date of Web Pages
Most news articles include the original publishing date in the article itself. However, in situations where the publishing date is not available, or if you think that the printed date is incorrect, you can use a simple Google trick to know when that web page was last published on the Internet.
Google can tell the date when a web page was first published on the Web.
Step 1. Go to google.com and copy-paste the full URL of any web page in the search box and prefix it with the inurl: operator.
For instance, if the URL of the page is page is:
https://www.example.com
You should write the URL in the Google Search box as:
inurl:https://www.example.com
Press the Search button and the URL in your browser address bar would read something like this:
Step 2. Now go your browser’s address bar - press Ctrl+L on a Windows machine or Cmd+L on Mac - and append &as_qdr=y25 to the end of the Google search URL. Press enter again.
The as_qdr=y25 parameter instructs Google to do a date-based search and retrieve pages that have been indexed by the Googlebot in the past 25 years (in other words, everything).
Step 3. Google will load the search results again but this time, you’ll see the actual publication date of the web page next to the title in Google search results as in the above screenshot.
Because Google can crawl any page the moment it is published on the Internet, the indexed date appearing in search results is often accurate.
However, if the content of a web page was updated after the first Google crawl, the publishing date may indicate the date when it was most recently edited by the website and not the date when it was first indexed or published on the Internet.
John is a public relations professional and he is often required you to send press releases and event invites to journalists, bloggers and influencers via email.
Reaching out to individual journalists can be slow so how do you send the same email to multiple people in one go? Some people use the BCC option in Gmail - compose a single email, put email addresses of all recipients in the BCC field and hit send.
That’s obviously the easiest option for sending bulk emails through Gmail but such generic email pitches are unlikely to get noticed.
Send Email Pitches with Gmail
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can use send personalised email pitches to your media contacts through Gmail and Google Sheets. You’ll be able to schedule your press releases in advance and also track which influencers have seen your emails.
The big advantage is that, unlike other mass email programs, messages sent via Mail merge are delivered just like regular emails directly in the Inbox.
Let’s get started:
How to use Mail Merge with Gmail
Go to the Google Workspace Marketplace and install the Gmail Mail Merge addon. You’ll need to grant certain permissions so that the add-on can send emails from your Gmail accounts. It also needs permission to attach files from your Google Drive.
Now that the add-on is installed, type sheets.new in your browser to create a new Google Sheet. Inside the sheet, go to the Addons menu, choose “Mail Merge with Attachments” and then select the “Create Merge Template” menu.
Your sheet now has all the essential columns that are required for running mail merge but can add more columns. We’ll add Location and News Outlet columns as shown in the above screenshot.
The next task is to get the media list into this Google Sheet. You can either import groups from Google Contacts, from your Mailchimp campaigns or, if you are an Excel user, export as CSV and directly import the CSV file into Google Sheets.
Create an Email Template for Merge
Open your Gmail, create a new email message (see screenshot) and save the template in your drafts folder. The email can have {{markers}} enclosed in double curly braces and these are replaced with actual values from the Google Sheet in your outgoing emails.
When we enclose some text inside double curly braces, it becomes a marker and these are replaced with values in the sheet. You can also add emojis in the subject and body.
Next, we can add some attachments to our email template. You can either upload files from your computer or you can bring directly from your Google Drive.
Configure and Run Mail Merge
Now that our email template in Gmail is ready, go back to your Google Sheet and choose Configure mail merge from the Mail Merge menu under add-ons.menu.
Follow the step by step wizard to configure merge but there are a few important things you should know.
You can send emails on behalf of any email address that is associated as an alias in your Gmail account. So an intern can send emails on behalf of the manager while logged into her own Google account.
You can add a CC or BCC email address and all your merged emails will be copied to them as well. Remember that Gmail counts every CC or BCC recipient as a separate email and thus it counts towards your daily email quota.
Mail Merge includes email tracking so you can know who opened your email or clicked the links. For email newsletters, you can even include an unsubscribe option in your email messages.
After the configuration is done, go to the Send Email Section, select the Send a test email option and hit the Go button.
Mail Merge will take the merge data from the first row in the Google Sheet and send you a test email. You can find the test email in your Gmail Sent folder.
If you are satisfied with the test email, go back to the Google Sheet, select the Run Mail Merge option and hit Go to perform a live merge. That’s it.
The emails will be dispatched immediately and you can check the Mail Merge Status column in the sheet to track the sending progress.
You can add more rows in the Google Sheet to send the same email to another batch of people and when you hit send, Mail Merge will automatically ignore the rows that have already been sent the email.
Mail Merge - Tips and Tricks
You can schedule emails - just add a date and time in the Scheduled Date column and run merge again to schedule the emails.
If you have a lot of rows in the sheet, you can skip sending emails to specific rows by hiding those rows in the Google Sheet. Alternatively, you may use filters in Google Sheets to only show rows that match certain criteria. When you run merge again, emails will be sent to visible rows only.
If you wish to cancel scheduled emails, you can either empty the scheduled date column or you can go to the Mail Merge menu, choose Help and click the Cancel Scheduled Mail option.
With Mail merge you can also send different attachments to different people. See how-to guide.
You can also create drafts with Mail Merge and this is a handy option if you wish to review the emails manually before sending them to real people.
A sample auto confirmation email sent through Google Forms
Google can tell the date when a web page was first published on the Web.
