How to export Google Forms questions

Last updated September 2026 · ~10 minute read

Short answer: Google Forms has no command that exports your questions. The editor's More menu carries Make a copy, Move to trash, Pre-fill form, Embed HTML, Print and Unpublish form — no download, no export, no save-as. The closest thing Google publishes is the Forms API's forms.get, which hands back the entire form as JSON and needs OAuth credentials to call. Everything else is a workaround: print it, copy it, or use a tool that writes the questions to a file — Forms+ exports them as a four-column CSV from an iPhone.

One distinction first, because it decides which page you should be reading. This one is about the questions — the form's own structure, what was asked and how. Getting the answers out is a separate job, covered in export to Excel and responses to PDF.

What Google actually offers, which is not an export

Worth establishing from the sources rather than from memory, because the absence is the whole reason people end up here. The Forms API publishes a machine-readable list of everything it can do, at the v1 discovery document. The copy we read carries revision 20260909 and describes ten methods in total: forms.create, forms.get, forms.batchUpdate, forms.setPublishSettings, two under forms.responses and four under forms.watches. The string “export” does not appear anywhere in that document. There is no export endpoint, because there is no export. What the API can do, and the quotas it does it under, are set out in Google Forms API limits.

What exists instead is forms.get, described in one line — “Get a form.” — as GET https://forms.googleapis.com/v1/forms/{formId}. It returns a Form object whose items array is your questions, each one an Item, documented as “A single item of the form. kind defines which kind of item it is.” That is genuinely everything — titles, options, required flags, grids, page breaks, images — the most complete description of a form Google hands out, and Google never calls it an export.

The help centre offers nothing either. The documented More menu lists Make a copy, Move to trash, Pre-fill form, Embed HTML, Print and Unpublish form; the export options Google does document — Link to Sheets and Download responses (.csv) — live in the Responses tab and export answers. For questions, Google is silent, and we are not going to convert that silence into a feature.

Route 1 — Print the form

If the export you want is a piece of paper, or a PDF of the blank questionnaire, this is the documented route and it takes three clicks: open the form in the editor, open More, choose Print. Set the print destination to Save as PDF and you have a file.

Good for review, sign-off, a hand-out, an archive copy a human will read. Useless to another system: a PDF of a form is a picture of a form. Our guide to printing a Google Form covers what comes out of the printer — and how little Google says about it.

Route 2 — Copy the questions inside Google

If the destination is another Google Form, you never need a file at all.

Make a copy, in the same More menu, duplicates the whole form — every question, and the settings with them. Use it when the new form is a variant of the old one. See duplicating a form for what travels and what does not.

Import questions reaches into another form and takes only the questions you tick. Google's instructions are exact: “At the right, click Add question and then Import questions. Click the form with the questions you want to import and then Select. On the right, click the box next to each question you want to add. Click Import questions.” That is a question bank in everything but name, and our question bank guide covers running one properly.

Both routes stay inside Google. Neither produces a file you can read, edit outside Forms, or keep.

Route 3 — Read the JSON through the API

This is the real export, and the cost is the honest part. forms.get requires an OAuth credential under one of five scopes — forms.body.readonly, forms.body, or one of the three Drive scopes — which in practice means a Cloud project, a consent screen, and code to make the call. Nobody does this to review forty questions before a meeting. It is right when a system needs the structure: a migration into another survey platform, a compliance archive, a diff between two versions of a form. And the JSON is a full description of the form, not a tidy questionnaire — turning it into something a person reads is work you do after the export, not before.

Route 4 — Write the questions to a CSV from your phone

Forms+ is a native iPhone and iPad client for your real Google Forms, and its editor has an Export questions as CSV… tool, described in the app as “Save this form's questions as a CSV file you can back up, edit in a spreadsheet, or import into another form.”

1. Open the form you want the questions from in the Forms+ editor.
2. Open the editor's tools menu, where the build tools sit — Find & replace, Bulk Edit, Question Bank, Templates and the two CSV rows.
3. Choose Export questions as CSV…. The app builds a four-column file — Title, Type, Options, Required — named after the form.
4. The share sheet opens with the CSV attached. Save it to Files, mail it, or open it in a spreadsheet app to edit the questions in bulk.

The format is small enough to read at a glance — this is the app's own sample file, shortened:

Options are pipe-separated. A linear scale carries its bounds, and optionally its two end labels, in the same cell: 1-5, or 1-5|Poor|Great. A grid needs two lists where every other type needs one, so it is defined once at the bottom of the file and referenced by name — which means two questions asking the same matrix share a single definition instead of two copies to keep in sync.

The Type column always states the question's true original type, including types the file cannot fully rebuild — writing a rating question out as “Short answer” would make the CSV lie about the form and make a re-import look lossless when it was not.

What the file does not carry

Four columns cannot describe a form, only its questions, and the gaps are specific rather than vague:

• Sections, page breaks, images, videos and the form header are not in it. The exporter skips them. A CSV of a sectioned form is a flat list of its questions, in order, with the structure between them gone.
• An untitled question cannot be written — a row with an empty Title reads back as a blank line. The app counts these and warns you before handing the file over, so you find out before your colleague does.
• An “Other” option disappears. A multiple-choice question with one option plus Other… exports as a question with one option.
• Nothing about quiz grading, logic or help text is in the four columns.

Coming back in

The same menu carries the reverse tool, Import questions from CSV…, reading the identical format — which makes this a round trip rather than a one-way dump. Export a long form, fix forty titles in a spreadsheet where find-and-replace is trivial, import the result. The same tool covers the case where the spreadsheet came first and there is no form yet, which is a different job from the one Google's own Sheets menu does — creating a Google Form from a spreadsheet separates the two.

Two types cannot be rebuilt on the way back: file upload and rating questions. They come in as the closest type that fits, and the import preview flags every converted row by name rather than performing the swap quietly. A grid survives if the file defines both its axes; otherwise that row degrades to a flat choice question and the preview says so, naming the definition it could not find. Warned conversion is the behaviour to want — a tool that silently turns everything it does not understand into a short-answer box produces a form that looks complete and is not.

Exporting questions is a PRO feature; the app puts its upgrade screen in front of the file being written. Check the current tier in the app itself before planning around it.

What a question export is not

• It is not a backup of your responses. Structure and data are separate exports. A file of questions restores what you asked, not a single answer anyone gave.
• It is not a copy of how the form looks. Even the copy routes are explicit — the app's own copy-a-form tool states that “Questions, options and settings are copied. The original's theme, fonts and text formatting are not.” If the look matters, see changing a form's theme.

The ceiling on the way back in

Whatever you export, the form it eventually lands in has published limits. On Edit your form 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.” The first surprises people: descriptions, images and videos share the budget with questions, so a 300-question form with section descriptions is already over the line. A source file bigger than that is more than one form, whatever tool builds it.

Which route do you want?

Frequently asked questions

Can you export the questions from a Google Form?

Not with a command in Google Forms. Google documents no export, download or save-as for a form's questions. The only place it enumerates the More menu at all is its screen-reader guide, which lists “options like” Make a copy, Move to trash, Pre-fill form, Embed HTML, Print and Unpublish form — worded as examples rather than a complete menu, so we will not claim it is exhaustive. No export appears among them. The nearest thing Google publishes is the Forms API method forms.get, which returns the whole form as JSON.

Where is the export button in Google Forms?

There isn't one for questions. The export options Google does document — Link to Sheets and Download responses (.csv) — live in the Responses tab and export answers, not the questions that were asked.

How do I get a Google Form's questions into another form?

Inside Google, without a file: Google's own instructions are to “click Add question and then Import questions. Click the form with the questions you want to import and then Select. On the right, click the box next to each question you want to add. Click Import questions.” Make a copy duplicates an entire form instead.

Can I save Google Forms questions as a spreadsheet?

Google publishes no route that writes questions to a spreadsheet. Forms+ has an Export questions as CSV tool that writes four columns — Title, Type, Options, Required — which opens in any spreadsheet app. Exporting is a PRO feature in the app.

Does exporting questions include the responses?

No. A question export is the form's structure — what was asked, in what order, with which options. Answers are a separate export entirely, through Link to Sheets or Download responses (.csv), and a file of questions is not a backup of your data.