Want to conduct a survey on your new product? Need to collect feedback from your training session? Any of such activity requires us to create some kind of template or forms where users can provide their feedback or give answers of the questions you asked. Use Forms in Google Docs for such surveys/questionnaires. Google Docs is a free service, that's not confined to just creating documents and spreadsheets only. It's a complete infrastructure to support the collaborative works.
Forms in Google docs are easy to create and use. You can embed forms on your blogs, websites or even you can send the form as an HTML email to your friends to collect responses via Emails. The responses are stored in a Google spreadsheet that can be exported in various formats.
You might be aware about other online survey services like SurveyMonkey.com. But free plans offered by such services is limited up to few hundred responses for approximately 10 questions. If you are expecting more responses and more questions to have then Google Docs is a perfect option for you (though, there are standard size limits for Google Docs). It costs nothing, yet provides everything! Lets see how to create Forms in Google Docs.
Creating Form in Google Docs
Building form with Google Docs is very easy. You have various options to set question types like text questions, multiple choice questions, etc. There are two ways available to create forms.
- Create Form from your Document List:
Click Create button on top-left side and then select Form. This will create an empty form and an empty spreadsheet with the same name you given to the form to collect the form responses.
- Create a form from a Google Spreadsheet:
Add questions and items to a formClick the Tools drop-down menu, click Create a form. The form response will be collected in the tab from which you create the form. A form menu will appear, the next time you open the spreadsheet.
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| Fig 1 - Available question types and other form items |
You can mark the question required if the question must be answered by the respondent (see Fig 2)
You can also ask Page Based questions. You can split your form in multiple pages based on the answer, the respondent will be redirected to different pages.
Note: Such page based questions work only on forms with multiple pages. Choose "page break" from the Add Item menu to add additional page.
You can provide a list of selective answers for a question by using question type as "Choose From List". In list based questions, respondent can only select a single answer from the drop down list of answers.
The grid based question type is a good way to collect responses for a group of similar questions in a new, compact grid format. The grid question type allows you to label a few columns and create as many rows as you like. Each row result appears in its own spreadsheet column.
Share your live form with your friends
Once you are done with creating the form, you can share the live form to your respondent. To share the form via Email open the spreadsheet (It will have the same name you given to the form) and then under the Form menu click Send form. You can also give the URL (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=YOUR_FORM_KEY) of your live form to the respondents. You can also embed the forms in your website or blog, too.
View summary and charts
Google Docs automatically generates charts from the responses. To see the summary and charts open Form > Show summary of responses.
Stop accepting responses
If you achieved the targeted numbers of responses then you can stop accepting the responses. Applying this will immediately stop accepting and storing response to your spreadsheet. You can find this option under the Form menu in response spreadsheet.
That's all! The form customizations are limited. Google is offering very limited set of features compared to paid surveys, albeit it's the most economical (completely free!) way to conduct surveys/questionnaires.
Here is a sample form created in Google Docs - http://goo.gl/A77AO
Here is a sample form created in Google Docs - http://goo.gl/A77AO