How to create a Google Form from a spreadsheet

Last updated September 2026 · ~9 minute read

Short answer: Google Sheets can start a form — the menu path is Tools ▸ Create a new form, documented at support.google.com/docs/answer/87809 on that article's Computer tab, and absent from its mobile tabs. But that route attaches a form to your spreadsheet; it does not read your rows and write questions out of them. Google publishes no feature that does. Building a form from data you already have needs a tool that reads the file — on iPhone and iPad, Forms+ has an Import questions from CSV tool that does exactly that.

Almost every confused search on this topic is two different jobs wearing one sentence. Sort out which one you are doing and the answer stops being contradictory.

Two directions, one phrase

• The spreadsheet is the destination. You want a form whose answers land in a sheet you already keep — a tracker, a roster, a log with columns and formulas waiting for the data. Google has a documented route for this and it starts inside Sheets.
• The spreadsheet is the source. You already have the questions — 60 rows of them, drafted by a committee in a shared sheet — and you want them to become a form without being retyped one at a time. Google publishes nothing for this. Something else has to read the file.

The two get conflated constantly, which is why people follow the Sheets instructions, watch an empty form appear, and assume they did it wrong. They did not. That route was never going to import anything.

Direction 1 — starting a form from inside Sheets

Google's create-a-form article documents the menu path in one line, and the tab it sits on is as informative as the path itself:

1. Open your spreadsheet on a computer — this route is on the article's Computer tab, and it is not on the mobile ones.
2. In the menu bar, open Tools.
3. Choose Create a new form.
4. Build your questions in the form that opens.
5. Walk the response settings before you send the link — none of them come from the spreadsheet.

That is the whole of what Google documents about it. The article gives the path and moves on; it does not go on to describe what the resulting form contains, and this page is not going to fill that in from somewhere else. If what you actually want is the link between an existing form and a sheet, that is a separate control in the Responses tab — responses in Google Sheets covers it.

What this route does not set up for you

The form arrives with none of the decisions that determine whether it behaves. Your spreadsheet has no opinion about any of the following, and neither does the menu command:

• Your column headers are not questions. Nothing in Google's documentation says a header row becomes a question, and you should not plan a project on the assumption that it will.
• Quiz mode, email collection, one-response-per-person, open or closed — all of these are settings on the new form, all at their defaults, all yours to set.
• Who can open it. On a work or school account the default is often restricted to the organisation, which silently locks out every outside respondent.

Treat the Sheets command as a shortcut to a starting point, not as a build step.

Direction 2 — when the spreadsheet holds the questions

This is the harder half, and the honest statement of it is short: a spreadsheet of questions is not a form until something builds it. There is no state in which a file of rows is secretly a draft form waiting to be opened. Some process has to walk the rows, decide a question type for each one, and issue create requests against the form. The only question is what performs that walk — you with a keyboard, a script, or an app.

What Google offers is not that. Its create-a-form documentation names starting from a blank form plus the routes in from Sheets and Drive, and never describes importing questions from a file or a cell range. Google is silent here, and a silence is what it is; we are not going to convert it into a feature or into a promise that one is coming.

Importing questions from a CSV in Forms+

Forms+ is a native iPhone and iPad client working on your real Google Forms in your own Drive, and its editor has an Import questions from CSV… tool. You pick a CSV or TSV file from Files, the app parses it, and a preview lists every question it found. The preview is a picker rather than a receipt: every row arrives ticked, and unticking one leaves it out — so a long file can be imported in part, which matters when your sheet is a backlog rather than a finished set.

The format is four columns, and it is worth seeing because it is the part people get wrong:

Options are pipe-separated. A linear scale carries its bounds and, optionally, its two end labels in the same column — 1-5 or 1-5|Poor|Great. Grids are defined once by a pair of rows whose Type reads Grid rows and Grid columns, and referenced by name from any question that needs them, so two questions can share one grid.

Types that cannot be rebuilt from four flat columns — file upload, rating, images and video — still import, as the closest type that fits, keeping whatever options they had. They are not converted quietly: the preview flags each changed row and a summary names them after the insert. That is the behaviour to want from an importer. A tool that silently turns everything it does not understand into a short-answer box produces a form that looks complete and is not.

The same file, going out

The reverse tool sits next to it in the same menu — Export questions as CSV… — writing the identical four-column format, so a form can be handed to someone else who imports it to recreate it. The app's own description of it is “Save this form's questions as a CSV file you can back up, edit in a spreadsheet, or import into another form.” That round trip is the practical way to bulk-edit a long form: export, fix forty question titles in a spreadsheet where find-and-replace is trivial, import the result. Both rows carry a PRO marker in the editor's tools menu, and export is gated — the app puts its upgrade screen in front of it before writing the file. Check the current tier in the app itself before you plan around either.

The ceilings your spreadsheet has to respect

However the questions get in, the form they land in has published limits. Google states that “you can add and edit up to 300 pieces of content, like questions, descriptions, images, and videos” and that “you can add up to 75 sections.” Two consequences worth planning around before you build a 400-row sheet:

• 300 counts more than questions. Descriptions, images and videos are in the same budget, so a form of 300 questions plus section descriptions is already over.
• A long sheet is more than one form. If your source data genuinely exceeds the cap, the answer is to split it, not to hunt for a tool that beats a server-side limit.

Per-answer text limits are a separate matter — see Google Forms character limits — as is how the questions get grouped once they are in, in multiple pages and sections.

Your form has two names, and only one of them is the title

This bites people importing in bulk, because the two look interchangeable in the editor and are not. A form carries a title that responders see, and separately a file name in Drive. In the Google Forms API these are info.title and info.documentTitle, and the second is documented as output only — it “cannot be modified by a batchUpdate request.” When a form is created programmatically, Google states that “Only the form.info.title and form.info.document_title fields are copied to the new form”: name it at creation, because the file name is not something a later update can reach. The full distinction is in form title vs file name.

Where Google is silent

Three gaps worth naming rather than papering over, because a guide that fills them invents things:

• What the Sheets route produces. Google documents the menu path and not the outcome.
• Any question import. No Google documentation describes building questions from a file, a cell range or a header row.
• What a copied form brings with it. A duplicate does not carry the original's responses across — but note that this is an inference from how forms and their response destinations work, not something Google states outright, and we flag it as one. Duplicating a form goes into it.

Which route do you want?

Frequently asked questions

Can you create a Google Form from a spreadsheet?

You can create a form from inside a spreadsheet. Google documents the menu path Tools ▸ Create a new form in Google Sheets, and documents it on the Computer tab of that article only. What Google does not document anywhere is a route that reads the contents of your sheet and builds questions out of them.

Does Google Forms turn spreadsheet rows into questions?

Google publishes no such feature. Its create-a-form article documents starting from a blank form, and the routes in from Sheets and Drive, and never describes importing questions from a file or a range of cells. Where Google is silent we are not going to invent a behaviour on its behalf.

Where is Create a new form in Google Sheets?

In the Sheets menu bar, under Tools. Google's create-a-form help article at support.google.com/docs/answer/87809 gives the path as Tools then Create a new form, on its Computer tab.

Can I build a Google Form from a spreadsheet on an iPhone?

Not through Google. The Sheets route is documented on the Computer tab only and is absent from the mobile tabs of the same article, and Google publishes no Google Forms app for iPhone at all. Forms+ is a third-party client that can import questions from a CSV or TSV file on the phone.

How many questions can a form built from a spreadsheet hold?

Google states that “you can add and edit up to 300 pieces of content, like questions, descriptions, images, and videos”, and that “you can add up to 75 sections.” A spreadsheet with 400 rows of questions is therefore at least two forms, whatever tool you use to build them.