Monday, June 22, 2009

How to create online survey

Believe or not, making survey on internet is very easy. Here you will find brief step by step tutorial how to create your own web survey (poll) with help of Google docs forms. After online survey is make and published visitors can fill poll and their responses are automatically added to your online spreadsheet. Google docs are really useful and easy to use tool. Here you can see example of online survey.

Sample Google Docs online survey:

Sample online survey (poll) created with Google Docs forms

Creating online survey
  • First go to Google docs and log in

    • to successfully log in you must have Google Account

    • in case you do not have Google Account go to Google Accounts

  • Go to menu "New" and click on "Form"

    Choose new form in Google Docs

  • In the form template that opens, you can add any questions and options you'd like

    • Enter title and description

    • Enter Question title

    • Choose question type

    • Question type can be:

      • Text

      • Paragraph text

      • Multiple Choice

        Editing multiple choice in Google Docs forms


      • Checkboxes

      • Choose from a list

      • Scale


    • Choose whether or not to make it a required question

    • Now you can add new question, (to get a new question, click the “Add Question” button at the top left of the page) or save and publish your survey

    • You can change Theme if you like

    • You can email the form (survey) to people, which allows them to fill it out and submit it right from their email, embed survey into your site or blog (it didn't work on my blog) or place a link to survey on your site

    • You can review responses as:

      • summary



      • spreadsheet



You can use summary to display results or process data in spreadsheet. It is your choice. I find this Google tool very impressive and user friendly. My recommendation to everyone is to take a look at Google Docs and explore their functionality.



Step by step guide to create sample online survey:

  • In Google Docs go to menu "New" and click on "Form"

  • Enter title "Test survey"

  • Enter description "This survey is for testing and demonstrating purpose"

  • Enter Question title "1. Enter your name?"

  • Click on Add question button and choose "Paragraph text"

  • Enter Question title "2. Please tell us your opinion about this tutorial"

  • Click on Add question button and choose "Multiple choice"

  • Enter Question title "3. Do you find this tutorial useful?"

  • In Option 1 enter "Yes"

  • In Option 2 enter "No"

  • Click on Done

  • Click Save

3 comments:

tmichieldds said...

Thanks for this post. It was very helpful.

There's one thing I couldn't get to work though.

When I'm finished filling out the survey, confirmation is supposed to show a message. The message is displayed on the top of the page but the scroll bar is scrolled all the way down. I don't think most people would know to scroll up to see the confirmation message. Any ideas what's going on there?

You can try my survey on
www.tmdds.com/survey.shtml
to see what I mean. I hope there's a fix for this.

Mark said...

I take a look and see your problem.

To avoid problem with confirmation scrollbar problem you could :
- redirect visitor directly to survey url as in my example instead of displaying it in frame on your site

or

- change iframe height, make it lower. Visitor will be forced to scroll down frame, not whole page and message will be visible
Example :
<iframe width="700" height="500" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" src="http://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=tl0YQlXn3xa5bSwvgQ-k9Qw">Loading...</iframe>

tmichieldds said...

Thanks for the response Mark. I'll try what you suggested.