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How to Send a File to Participants After they Submit your Google Form

When someone fills out your Google Form, you may want to send a file or two to the form respondent. For instance:

  1. A school teacher can send a Word document containing a copy of the answers to students who have completed the quiz.
  2. A musician can send her latest composition as an MP3 file to users who have completed her website survey built with Google Forms.
  3. An author can email a preview copy of her upcoming book in PDF to fans who have subscribed to her newsletter.
  4. An online store may send their catalog PDF to customers who have placed orders through Google Forms.

Demo - Send Files with Google Forms

Open this Google Form, type your email address and hit the Submit button. Check your inbox and you should immediately find a PDF copy of our famous 101 useful websites collection.

How to Attach Files to Form Emails

The Email Notifications add-on for Google Forms lets you send customized emails to form respondents after a new entry is received. The same notification can also be customized to include one or more file attachments that are picked from your Google Drive and sent as an attachment in the auto-responder email.

Add File to Google Drive

  1. Go to the Google Drive website and upload any file that you wish to send via Google Forms.
  2. Change the sharing settings on the file so that it is accessible to anyone with a link. You cannot attach private files to form emails.
  3. Right-click the file in Google Drive and choose Get Link to copy the full URL of the file to the clipboard.

File Attachments in Google Drive

Configure Google Forms

  1. Go to your Google Form, and create a new email rule.
  2. Check the Notify Form Submitter option and select the form field where you ask for the email address of the form submitter.
  3. Go to the Attach Files section and paste the URL of the Google Drive file that you have copied in the previous step.

Save the rule to activate it. Submit a new form and when new users submit the form, they’ll automatically receive a copy of your file as an attachment.

Send File Attachment

PS: You may use this workflow to send files in any format including PDF, Images, Audio, Video, GIFs, PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents. The file size should be less than 5 MB. Also, it is not possible to attach native Google file formats like Google Docs, Sheets and Google Slides.

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How to Email Google Form Notifications to Multiple People

Tara Harris writes - “I have created a Google Form, and when someone fills out the form, I would like that submission to go to myself and 4 other people. Is there a way for me to implement that?”

The Google Forms Email add-on can be used to email form data to one or more people. Install the Forms add-on and create a rule for sending email notifications (video tutorial).

A: Send Email to One or More Recipients

In the Email addresses to Notify field, you can put one or more email addresses of people who should receive the notifications.

Google Forms Email

B: Send Email to the Form Submitter

Suppose you have a question - Email Address - in your Google Form where you ask the submitter to provide their email address. You can put {{Email Address}} in the notify field to send a confirmation email to the person who filled that form.

If your Google Form requires the submitter to login into their Google Account before they can complete the form and you are also collecting email addresses, the field {{Username}} will automatically hold the respondent’s email address. In that case, you can put {{Username}} in the notify emails field to send an auto-response to the submitter.

C: Notify Form Submitter

There’s another easy way to send email notifications to the Form Submitter. Check the Notify Submitter box and select the field in the drop-down where you are asking the respondent to fill their email address.

Notify Google Forms Submitter