Where your specs go

Every spec you submit becomes one row in a shared Google spreadsheet. Nothing else is kept anywhere: the spreadsheet is the record.

Opening the spreadsheet

Below the form’s Submit button is a panel labelled Open the spreadsheet — “Every submission lands here as a row”. It opens the spreadsheet in a new tab. It sits below the form on purpose, out of the way, so you cannot lose a half-typed spec by mis-tapping it.

Whether you can view the spreadsheet depends on your Google account having been given access to it — the form itself can always write to it, but the link only opens for people it has been shared with. If it will not open for you, ask the person who runs it to share it with your Google account.

What you do

1. Scroll just below the Submit button.
2. Tap Open the spreadsheet.
3. If Google asks you to sign in, sign in with the account the sheet was shared with.

How the spreadsheet is organised

• One tab per site. Specs for amapas353.com land in the tab called Site Specifications; specs for traveller.org land in the tab called traveller.org; specs for albums.traveller.org land in the tab called albums.traveller.org. The tab a row is in is what says which site it is for — there is no “site” column.
• Four columns, in this order: Spec Type, Description, Submitted By, Timestamp.
• Timestamp is stamped by the server, not by your device, at the moment the row is saved. It is recorded in universal time (UTC), so it will read a few hours off from local clock time.
• New rows are always added at the bottom. The form never edits or deletes existing rows.

Working in the spreadsheet

The spreadsheet is an ordinary Google Sheet and the rows are yours to work with — sort them, colour them, comment on them, delete a test row you made by mistake. Two cautions, though:

• Leave the header row (row 1) alone. The app writes headers only into a completely empty tab and never rewrites them afterwards. If you delete just the header row while data rows remain, it stays missing; if you rename the headers, they no longer match what the app expects the columns to mean.
• Do not reorder or insert columns. New rows are written in the fixed order above, so moving columns around puts new answers under the wrong headings.

If a tab is ever emptied completely — every row including the header — the app recreates the header row by itself on the next submission, so a fresh tab needs no manual set-up.

There is no test mode

There is no practice or sandbox version of the form: every submit writes a real row to the real spreadsheet. If you file a test entry, open the spreadsheet and delete that row afterwards.