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We were recently considering quick prototyping using Google Forms but ran into two key limitations:

(1) Getting a _validated_ email address of the submitter. It does support an email field, but makes it a free-form text input with no way of enforcing ownership of that email.

(2) Pre-populating some of the fields when we send the user to a form via a link. Without this, the user ends up filling the fields even though they have already submitted that information in another form.

Are there any powerful (forms + spreadsheet) products out there that solve these (and are cheaper than, say, AirTable) ?

(2)



Calcapp may be what you're looking for. You can validate text fields using regular expressions and there's an example of how to validate an e-mail address here: https://www.calcapp.net/learn/beyond-numbers.html#validating.... Fields can be pre-populated with either values you know ahead-of-time or through Excel-like formulas.

(I'm a co-founder of Calcapp.)


> enforcing ownership of that email.

I believe the GP was talking more about "click here to confirm your account" type validation, not "does it have an @ in it".


You can generate URLs that pre-fill Google Forms, they're just ugly and have the all the pre-fill in the URL as query parameters


Yes. We can make one in 30 minutes with https://qbix.com/platform . But what is the goal of this? I want to understand since it sounds like you need real PROFILES for reusable personal data.




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