Export Gravity Forms entries to Google Sheets

GravityExport can send your form entries straight to a Google Sheets spreadsheet and keep that spreadsheet in step with your form. Numbers arrive as numbers, dates as dates, and currency as currency, so you can sort, filter, and build formulas in the sheet without converting anything first.

This article walks through connecting a Google account, pointing a form at a spreadsheet, and choosing when the export runs.

Note: Google Sheets export requires GravityExport 1.15.0 or later.

Before you start #

You need all of the following:

• Gravity Forms installed and active, with at least one form that has entries.
• GravityExport 1.15.0 or later installed and active.
• A site served over HTTPS. On a site running over plain HTTP, the connect button appears unavailable.
• A Google account with access to Google Drive.

How the export works #

GravityExport mirrors your form into a single tab of a spreadsheet. Every export rewrites that tab in full rather than appending rows to the bottom, so one new entry and the whole form are the same operation. The tab always reflects the current state of the form, including dropping rows for entries you have deleted.

One Google account is shared by every export on the site. You connect it once, then each feed chooses which spreadsheet and tab it writes to.

How often the sheet updates

The Export Trigger on the feed decides what causes a rewrite. This is the setting that determines whether an edit reaches the sheet straight away:

Trigger	New entry	Edited entry	Deleted, trashed, or restored entry	Rows added by an import, the REST API, or WP-CLI
Automatic	Rewrites	Rewrites	Rewrites	Rewrites once when the import finishes
Scheduled	Waits for the schedule	Waits for the schedule	Waits for the schedule	Waits for the schedule
Webhook	Waits for the URL	Waits for the URL	Waits for the URL	Waits for the URL

On an Automatic feed, editing an entry updates the sheet immediately. Edits made on the entry detail page, through GravityView’s Edit Entry or inline edit, or by another add-on calling the API all count. If you would rather only new entries reached the sheet, turn off Export on Update on the feed.

On a Scheduled or Webhook feed, nothing an entry does touches the sheet. Only the schedule or the webhook URL causes a write, and Export on Update has no effect.

Changes made in a single request are combined into one rewrite, so importing fifty rows rewrites the tab once rather than fifty times.

Step 1: Connect your Google account #

The connection lives in your site’s GravityKit settings, not on an individual form.

1. In your WordPress admin, go to GravityKit > Settings, then open the GravityExport tab.
2. Find the Cloud Storage section.
3. Click Connect to Google Sheets.
4. Sign in to Google and approve the request. GravityExport only asks for access to the spreadsheets you create or pick, not your whole Drive.
5. When you return to WordPress, the section shows the connected account address.

Once connected, the same row names the account exports run as, and offers buttons to test or disconnect it.

To confirm the connection works, click Test Connection.

While you are on this screen, consider enabling Monitor connections. It checks your cloud connections about every twelve hours and alerts you if one goes offline, which is how you find out that Google has stopped accepting the connection before your exports quietly stop.

Note: If the connect button is unavailable, the reason appears beneath it. The usual causes are a site not running over HTTPS, a missing or expired license, a site that has not been activated, or a license that has used all its activations.

Step 2: Enable the download URL on your form #

GravityExport Save does not appear in a form’s settings until that form has a GravityExport download enabled, because nothing it configures can run before then.

1. Open your form, then go to Settings > GravityExport.
2. Enable the Download URL.

GravityExport Save now appears in the form’s settings sidebar.

Step 3: Create the export feed #

1. Go to Settings > GravityExport Save on the same form.
2. Click Add New.
3. Give the feed an Export Name. This is for your reference only and does not affect the spreadsheet.

Step 4: Choose Google Sheets as the destination #

Open the Storage tab of the feed and choose Google Sheets as the storage type. The feed screen shows which Google Account it will use, which is the account you connected in step 1.

If you skipped step 1, the tile reads Google Sheets — connect it under GravityKit Settings and cannot be selected. Connect the account first, then come back.

The panel repeats the most important thing about this destination:

This feed will rewrite every row on each export. Tab contents will be fully overwritten: keep your notes, formulas and charts on a different tab.

Take that literally. Anything you add to the feed’s tab by hand is gone on the next export, so put your own work on a separate tab in the same spreadsheet.

The usual way to do that is a second tab that reads from the exported one. If the feed’s tab is named Contact Form, either of these pulls its data across:

={'Contact Form'!A:Z}

=QUERY('Contact Form'!A:F, "select A, C where F = 'Yes'")

Formulas, charts and pivot tables on your own tab survive every export, and they keep up to date on their own because the tab they read from does.

Step 5: Pick the spreadsheet #

Under Spreadsheet, choose one of two options.

Option	What happens
Create a new spreadsheet, named after the form	GravityExport creates a spreadsheet in your Google Drive on the first export. After that run, the feed screen links to it.
Choose an existing spreadsheet from Google Drive	A picker opens so you can select a spreadsheet you already have.

If you choose an existing spreadsheet, click Choose a spreadsheet from Google Drive. The picker opens in a separate window, signed in as the connected account. Only the spreadsheets you select here can be reached by GravityExport. There is no field for pasting a spreadsheet link, because picking a file in Google’s own window is what grants access to it. A pasted link grants nothing, so a feed configured that way would look finished and fail on every run.

Note: Picking a spreadsheet requires an administrator, because selecting one grants access to the Google account the site exports with. Users who can edit feeds but are not administrators see which spreadsheet the feed is bound to, rather than the picker.

Step 6: Name the tab #

Tab Name controls which tab inside the spreadsheet the feed writes to. Leave it blank to use the form title.

A few things are worth knowing before you save:

• If a tab with this name already exists in the spreadsheet, this feed takes it over and replaces everything in it. Use a name of its own if the spreadsheet holds other work.
• Changing this name later renames the feed’s tab on its next export. You can also rename the tab in Google Sheets, and the feed keeps writing to it.
• Several feeds can share one spreadsheet. Each feed keeps to its own tab, so a single workbook can collect entries from several forms.
• Deleting the feed’s tab in Google Sheets is not how you stop exporting. The next run creates it again and refills it. To stop the export, deactivate or delete the feed in WordPress.

Step 7: Choose the columns #

Columns decides which fields become columns, and in what order.

• The fields configured in the connected GravityExport feed follows the field list on the form’s GravityExport tab, including its order and any fields turned off there. This is the default.
• Every field on the form ignores that list and exports everything, entry meta included.

Both settings are shown in the screenshot above.

Step 8: Choose when the export runs #

On the feed’s General tab, set the Export Trigger:

• Automatic (on every new entry) exports whenever an entry is submitted.
• Scheduled exports on an interval you choose. The first run happens when you save the feed, and it repeats from there. Intervals includes Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Every 30 Days, and other options.
• Webhook exports when a request hits the feed’s webhook URL.

Leave Failure Alerts enabled to get a dashboard notice when an export fails. The notice clears after the next successful export.

Note: The Entries to Include option, which lets a scheduled export send only entries received since the last successful run, is not available for Google Sheets. It appears for file-based destinations such as Local, FTP, Dropbox, and Box. A Google Sheets export always sends the whole form, because the tab is a mirror rather than a growing file: narrowing a run would shrink the tab to that interval and overwrite everything before it.

Save the feed. To send entries straight away without waiting for the schedule, use Export Now from the feed list. It asks for confirmation first, since it writes to the destination immediately and replaces what is there.

Checking that exports are working #

Every feed has an Activity Log tab listing its recent exports: what each one wrote, when, and why any of them failed. The most recent 100 runs are kept, and a failure stays visible even after later exports succeed.

The feed list also shows Last Run and Next Run, and the Storage column links directly to the spreadsheet the feed writes to.

Opening that spreadsheet shows the export itself. Each entry is one row, the header row comes from the columns you chose, and the values arrive typed rather than as text, so dates sort as dates and numbers add up.

A few things you can rely on in that sheet:

• Numbers, currency and dates arrive as real values, so sorting, SUM and charts work on them without converting anything first.
• Text is written exactly as submitted. Leading zeros and phone numbers keep the form they were entered in.
• A submitted value that looks like a formula is stored as text, so it can never run in your spreadsheet.

During an export you may briefly see an extra tab named __gk_export_staging_ followed by a number. That is the working area for the run in progress: GravityExport builds the new data there and moves it into your tab in one step, so your tab is never half written. It removes itself when the run finishes.

Limits #

• A Google spreadsheet holds at most 10 million cells across all of its tabs, and an export briefly needs room for two copies of its data. Treat about half that ceiling as the practical limit for one feed.
• A single cell holds at most 50,000 characters. A longer value is shortened and marked with … [truncated]. The full value stays in your Gravity Forms entry.

If an export does not fit, the run stops and tells you by how much, and your spreadsheet is left exactly as it was. Narrow the export with a filtered source feed, or point the feed at a spreadsheet with more room.

If the connection stops working #

If Google stops accepting the connection, exports to Google Sheets begin failing and a notice appears in your WordPress dashboard. To fix it, return to GravityKit > Settings > GravityExport and click Reconnect to Google Sheets.

Connections you made before your license lapsed keep working and keep refreshing, whether or not the license is current. A current license is only required to make a new connection or to open the spreadsheet picker.

After moving, cloning, or renaming a site

A Google connection belongs to the site address that made it. Cloning a site, promoting a staging copy to live, or moving to a new domain all read as a different site, so the connection shows as needing attention and exports stop until someone reconnects.

This is deliberate. Without it, a copied database would carry the original site’s Google access with it, and every clone would quietly write to your spreadsheets. Two things follow from it: reconnecting on the copy does not affect the original site, and disconnecting on the copy does not cancel the original site’s access.

Related articles #

• How to trigger a GravityExport Save Feed
• How to schedule automated exports
• Connecting Dropbox to GravityExport
• Getting started with GravityExport