How to Make Google FormsTM Responses not case-sensitive
When creating escape rooms, tests, or other types of Google Forms that require a specific short-answer response in order to progress to the next question, you will want to use response validation. Unfortunately, this can sometimes cause frustration when people fill out the form and have to either type in all caps, or if someone capitalizes the first letter of a word. Using regular expressions, it is easy to create questions in Google Forms that require a specific answer, but are not case sensitive.
The image below will is creating a short-answer question that only the word “cow” will allow the form user to progress to the next question. However, they could enter it as COW, Cow, cOW, or any combination of capital and lower-case letters.
Here’s how to do it:
Step 1: Use the + icon to create a new question.
Step 2: Select “short answer” from the dropdown of question types
Step 3: Toggle the button at the bottom right to make the question required
Step 4: Click the three vertical dots and choose “Response Validation.”
Step 5: From the two dropdowns, choose “Regular Expression” and “Contains”
Step 6: Enter your acceptable answer with pairs of capital and lower case letters inside of brackets. For example, if your acceptable answer is the word “cow,” enter [Cc][Oo][Ww]. *Google Forms can be a bit finicky. Sometimes you have to enter this information slowly to let the form catch up on saving your information.
Step 7: Enter your custom error text. This might be simply words like “Keep Trying,” or a hint to the puzzle.
One More Tip
If you use the text [Cc][Oo][Ww] in your response validation field, the form will also accept words like cows, seacow, cowpen as all of these words contain the three required characters of cow. To specify exactly the response of cow, use a ^ at the beginning of the regular expression. That means nothing can come before the word cow. Then, use a $ at the end to let the form now that the entry must end at that point. Here is how it will look: ^[Cc][Oo][Ww]$.
That’s it! You might also want to check out our quick tip for having an OR option in your response validation in forms.
