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Embedding a Google Docs form

  1. dragonflywoman
    Member

    I have spent the last couple of hours setting up a Google Docs spreadsheet and a form to go with it and I would like to post the form on my blog. According to the instructions provided at http://en.support.wordpress.com/google-docs/, this should be very easy - just copy the embed code and paste it into my blog. I can't get it to work though! Questions:

    1) Do I paste the code into the HTML viewer or the visual viewer? (I've tried both...)
    2) Do I just paste the embed code, or do I need to do anything else?

    I've tried everything I can think of and it's just not working for me. Stupid to be defeated by something that should be so easy...

    Thanks to anyone who can help!

  2. raincoaster
    Member

    Did you follow these instructions?

    Spreadsheets

    To add a spreadsheet from Google Docs, open it and click on the share button at the top right corner of your screen. Click on the “Publish as a web page” link.

    Click on the “Start publishing” button:

    From the second dropdown menu select the “HTML to embed in a page” option:

    The last step is to copy/paste the iframe code into a Post, Page or Text Widget in your WordPress.com blog.

  3. dragonflywoman
    Member

    I don't want to publish the entire spreadsheet - just the form. Do I have to do that even if I just want to publish the form?

  4. raincoaster
    Member

    Is the Form entirely separate from the spreadsheet? Do you have a link to it?\

    What specific instructions are you following? Step by step, please.

  5. dragonflywoman
    Member

    The form links to the spreadsheet, but the instructions for embedding spreadsheets and embedding the form are different in the instructions provided by WordPress (link above). I have been following the form instructions, not the spreadsheet instructions because I don't want to publish the spreadsheet itself. My spreadsheet includes contact information and location data - not something I want to leave visible to everyone - so I only want the form embedded on the blog.

    This is what I've done so far:

    1) Set my spreadsheet to Public on the Web

    2) From my open and saved form, I clicked More Actions and then Embed

    3) I copied the iframe code that appeared in the pop up

    4) I pasted the iframe code into my blog on the HTML viewer

    All I'm getting is a blank page where I expect a form to be, so clearly I'm doing something wrong with the very complicated 2 step instructions provided by WordPress or I'm missing something...

  6. raincoaster
    Member

    Your iframe code should look like this:

    http://en.support.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/googledocs6-iframe.png

    and then you paste it in. You don't need the spreadsheet to be public, you need the Form to be public.

    Try pasting it in the Visual editor. Sometimes that makes a difference.

    If the Form is not public, nothing will work, of course.

  7. dragonflywoman
    Member

    That's exactly what I'm doing, but it's not working... I've tried pasting in the visual and the HTML editor, but when I publish the page either it's blank (when I past into HTML) or shows the code (when I paste it into visual). Any other ideas? This should be so simple. I mean 2 steps - how hard can it be? I can simply link to the form outside of my blog if I have to, but I'd really love to embed the form if I can.

  8. timethief
    Member

    This is a shot in the dark. There's a maximum displayed image width in every theme. Do you think that could be a factor? http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/maximum-image-width/

  9. dragonflywoman
    Member

    Good idea! Unfortunately, changing the width of the form didn't work.

  10. raincoaster
    Member

    Wait.

    Paste it into the Visual editor, and if there's an active link (like those above, highlighted in blue) put your cursor on it and hit the Unlink button. Once you've taken out all the active links (leaving the code there) hit Publish.

  11. dragonflywoman
    Member

    It's not automatically putting in a link (I checked to be sure) when I enter it into the visual editor, so it is reading the iframe code like text and just displays the code when I view the page rather than embedding the form. The softwater IS changing the format of the iframe link when I hit the update key though. Wonder if that's causing a problem...

  12. raincoaster
    Member

    Softwater? What is that?

  13. dragonflywoman
    Member

    Software. Sorry - I'm an aquatic scientist and I've been working on my dissertation so my brain goes on autopilot sometimes!

  14. raincoaster
    Member

    The software SHOULD change the format of the link. It should change the brackets to square brackets and significantly shorten the whole thing.

    Are you quite sure you're pasting it directly from Google and not sticking it in Word or some interstitial program first? I have to check all of this.

    Also, what browser and version are you using? Can you try Firefox if you're not using it now?

  15. raincoaster
    Member

    Here are some more suggestions

    http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/embedding-google-docs-forms?replies=9#post-616507

  16. dragonflywoman
    Member

    Firefox didn't work, but I got some ideas from the threads you posted and got it working! Here's what I did. When I copied and pasted the iframe code for my form, WordPress changed it to this (I'm keeping my actual form key private so that I can avoid spam on my form):

    [googleapps domain="spreadsheets" dir="spreadsheet/embeddedform" query="formkey=MyFormKey" width="760" height="1997" /]

    It magically worked when I took out the "speadsheet" part of dir="spreadsheet/embeddedform" so that it was just dir="embeddedform"! Apparently you don't need to specify spreadsheet in both the domain and the dir. Then I just changed the height and width so it would fit into my theme and this code was the result:

    [googleapps domain="spreadsheets" dir="embeddedform" query="formkey=MyFormKey" width="100%" height="2500"/]

    Now it works! Apparently the dir coding wasn't converting properly when I updated the page and the system translated the iframe data into whatever code WordPress uses. I'm SO thrilled this wasn't just some stupid error on my part! I was actually hoping there was an issue on the WordPress end because I'm a strong computer user and being defeated by a process that involved essentially "Copy, Paste" was going to be a serious blow to the old ego. :) I'll let the admin people know as soon as their contact page is up and running again so that they know this is a problem.

  17. drcharoen
    Member

    One of the Hapiness Engineer at wordpress informed me that they stopped supporting iframe codes. Is this the case?

  18. drcharoen
    Member

    I tried deleting the spreadsheet from the code and it works. Thank you.

  19. designsimply
    Happiness Engineer

    @drcharoen, that's technically correct, but there are a few iframes which are converted automatically by the system. For anything like that, the support site will have the proper steps for using them so if you're wondering about a specific iframe, search there first: http://en.support.wordpress.com/

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