How to Embed Barcode and QR Code In Google Forms Notifications

The Google Form Notifications add-on lets you automatically send Google Form responses in an email message to one or more recipients. The email notifications are dispatched the moment your form receives a new submission.

The more recent version of the Google Form addon includes support for QR Code and Barcode symbols that you can embed in the email messages. The images can be generated from static text or you can create dynamic images based on answers submitted by the user.

Add QR Code images in Emails

The basic syntax for adding QR Code images in emails is:

=QRCODE(Your Text Goes Here)

You can customize the colors and size of the QR code image by adding key-value pairs in the QRCODE function.

For instance, if you would like the QRCode to have Indigo background and the QRCode should be itself in white color, the modified formula with the hex color codes would be:

=QRCODE(TEXT textcolor=#FFFFFF backgroundcolor=#4B0082)

The QR Code images have a default width of 300px but if you customize the size with the width parameter as shown below:

=QRCODE(TEXT width=225)

Include dynamic text in QR Code images

Until now, we have seen examples of static text but the Google Forms addon can also create QR Code images from text in Google Form Answers using placeholders.

For instance, if your Google has a question title “What is your website address?”, you can use a QR Code function like the one below. This will turn the user’s answer into a dynamic QR code that, on scanning, will take you to the form respondent’s website.

=QRCODE({{WWhat is your website address}} textcolor=#4B0082)

Embed Barcode in Email Notifications

The Email Notifications add-on also includes support for BARCODE function to help you embed barcode images in PNG format for EAN, UPC, ISBN, postal codes, GS1 Database and all other popular formats.

The basic syntax for barcode function is:

=BARCODE(TEXT format=CODE39)

For instance, if you would like to embed the barcode image for a book whose ISBN-13 code is 9781786330895, the function would be:

=BARCODE(9781786330895 format=EAN13 includetext=true)

The includetext=true parameter would ensure that the text for data is included into the barcode image.

You can also modify the colors of barcode image using hex codes:

=BARCODE(9781786330895 format=EAN13 includetext=true barcolor=AA0000 textcolor=008888 backgroundcolor=FFFF60)

You can similarly modify the width of the Barcode image, the height of the bars, add borders, padding and more. Please consult the documentation for a complete range of formats and options supported by the =BARCODE() function in Google Forms.