How to analyze Google Forms short-answer responses

Google Forms is built around closed questions. When someone responds, you can look at a summary in the form or store the responses in a linked Google Sheet (Google). Counts and charts suit questions with fixed options. A short-answer box has no fixed options, so there is nothing to count until you decide how to group the replies.

That grouping is the work. The steps below are one way to do it by hand.

In the form, open Responses, then Summary. Click More, then Select destination for responses. Create a new spreadsheet or pick an existing one (Google). Google Sheets puts the data in a table, and new responses keep arriving until you unlink the Sheet.

Each short-answer question gets its own column. Pick the one you want to analyze first. Copy it into a new tab so your labels never touch the raw data.

Read the first 20 or so replies straight through before you label anything. You're looking for the different things people say, in their words.

Then add a label column next to the replies. Name each label after what happened to the person, not how they felt. "Frustrated" fits half the replies and tells you nothing. "Couldn't find the export button" tells you what to fix. If a reply says two things, give it a second label column.

Once every reply has a label, count them. In an empty cell, type the label name, and next to it use COUNTIF:

=COUNTIF(C2:C101, E2)

COUNTIF returns a conditional count across a range, and it isn't case sensitive (Google). Sort the finished list from the biggest count to the smallest. Now you have a short list with numbers next to it.

Enform does this step for you. It reads every reply, counts what people said, and each count opens to the replies behind it. If you stay in Sheets, keep reading.

If you don't want to label every reply, COUNTIF accepts wildcards. A * matches zero or more characters (Google), so this counts every reply that contains "price":

=COUNTIF(B2:B101, "*price*")

It's quick, and it breaks in three ways:

• It misses synonyms. "Too costly" and "expensive" don't contain "price".
• It matches negations. "Price wasn't a problem" counts as a price reply.
• COUNTIF takes one condition, so a reply that contains two keywords is counted once under each (Google).

The numbers below are invented to show the problem. They are not from a real survey.

Say a workshop feedback form asked "What would you change?" and got 40 replies. Keyword counts might look like this:

Those add up to 34, but the counts overlap, and "time" could mean "ran out of time", "bad start time" or "waste of my time". Reading the 14 replies would show three different problems. The keyword count told you where to look. It didn't tell you what you found.

Filter the Sheet to the replies under each of your three biggest labels and read them one after another. A label is a summary you wrote, and summaries drift. You'll often find that one label is really two. Split it, recount, and only then pick quotes to share.

Google Forms can summarize text answers with Gemini. Summaries for each text question are generated in the summary block, once there are 3 to 200 responses. Direct questions like names and addresses are skipped, quiz responses can't be summarized, and the summaries aren't saved, so you copy them or generate them again. The feature needs an eligible Google Workspace or Google AI plan (Google).

In February 2026, Google added counts and percentages of responses grouped by topic. It works best with 8 to 200 responses, and the option goes away above 200 (Google, Workspace Updates).

That covers a lot of small forms. If your plan doesn't include it, or you have more than 200 replies, you're back to the Sheet method.

You have three realistic options for short-answer replies:

• By hand in Sheets. It works on any Google account and you control every label. It takes an afternoon per question, and it gets slow past a few hundred replies.
• Gemini in Forms. Fast, and it's already where your responses are. It depends on your plan, stops at 200 responses, and its summaries aren't saved.
• A tool that reads replies for you. Enform writes the survey from a description, you share one link, and it reads every reply and counts what people said. Every count opens to the replies behind it, which is step 4 without the filtering. It can also draft a deck.

If you already live in Google Forms and have a small number of replies, the Sheet method or Gemini is probably enough. If you'll run this survey again, or the replies are the point of the survey, a tool that does the counting is worth a look. See Enform vs Google Forms, the Google Forms alternatives page, our roundup of survey tools that summarize open-ended answers, or pricing. The longer method is in how to analyze open-ended survey responses.