Creating Online Surveys

You can use Google Forms to create simple online surveys for just about anything. You can use them for business or personal projects. You can ask multiple choice or open-ended questions and include a variety of other The results can be viewed her response, or as a spreadsheet.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's use Goggle Forms to create simple online surveys.
So you've probably seen surveys on the internet. You've probably taken many of them. Sometimes you see them as a post in Facebook. 
Sometimes you get them in an email from a company you do business with or maybe from some friends or an organization you are part of. 
It's really easy to setup a survey. You can use a variety of different websites to do it. But the easiest and cheapest way to do it is to use Goggle to do it. It's fairly simple and I've done it several times for MacMost. So let me show you how it is set up.
So I'm starting off here in gmail just to demonstrate that all you need is a Goggle account. It's the same account you would use for gmail or YouTube or a variety of other Goggle services. So it doesn't really matter that I'm starting here. I'm just showing you I have a gmail account here and I'm going to go over to drive.goggle.com.
When you go to drive.goggle.com this is where you can store things. It's kind of like their version of iCloud. You've got the ability to create a new document here. When you do you get New and then it shows you the main ones, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. We're actually going to go to More and Create a Goggle Form.
So let's say you're the parent in charge of deciding where and what to do at the end of a sport season for your child's sports team. So we're going to create a survey for that so you can let the rest of the team decide. You can put a description here, or you can just get going right to the first question. It is going to put a multiple choice question there by default but you can change the type of question here. We'll look at those in a second.
There is already going to be an Option 1 there. You can click to edit it and then you can click Add Option to add another one and edit that one. Let's add another one. Then when you're done you can basically go down here and you can select whether or not this is Required, like they have to answer this. You can't go past the survey submitted without answering it. This is certainly what we want to do here. The three dots are extra buttons for extra things here like further description for the question if you wanted to get a little more detailed, for instance.
Now that we're done that we can go and use these buttons on the right to add things. So you can add all sorts of things here. You can get really complex adding videos and images and things like that. We're just going to add another question. 
So at the end of this question, for this question (Are you willing to come early to help?), this is going to be a short answer. So maybe this is a better one for a multiple choice and we can do yes and no.
So here this one (What are you willing to bring?) might be a short answer. So just let people type whatever it is they want to type.
Then, of course, we want to know who these people are (What is your name?). We'll change this one to short answer and just so we have an email address handy we'll change that to a short answer as well.
So you can go and play with all the different types of questions that you can ask. There are interesting things like a linear scale so they can choose a number on a line. A grid of choices they can choose. You can have a Date. So for instance we can add one here that's like what date would you like to have the party and things like that.
When we're done we can basically, the thing is ready to go, and now we can preview it. Just use the Preview button here and it will go to another page and you can see what the survey will look like. You can even try it, fill it out, that kind of thing and hit Submit.
Close that, go back here and we also have Settings. So only allow a person to submit 1 response, that kind of thing. Then we can hit Send. Everything is automatic. We can go up here and edit the title for this. But you can go right here and Send and we can send right here by email and type in email addresses here. Put a Subject and a Message and we can even include the form in the email or just have a link which is probably the normal way to do it so they would just go to fill out the survey.
So let's pretend we've done that and if we go back to the Goggle drive page here we can see, inside Forms, we've got now the recent form. So at any point we can go back into this and edit it.
Now if you don't want to use the regular sending function here you can actually switch over to the Link here and it will just give you this link and even shorten it there to make it a very simple link and you can copy and paste that in anything. So if you want to send this message or post it to Facebook, for instance, or maybe there's a regular email you send out to the team anyway and you want to include that link in there. So you don't want to use this function you want to use a link you can do that. This will allow people to go to the form and not have to get an email directly from it here.
So let's say you've sent it out and let's take a look at what happens when people get it. So here I'm going to go to the shortened  link. There's the survey. Let's say pizza place, contributes, soda, name, and email address, and hit Submit. Great.
So now we can go back over here to the forms and I can look at Responses and I can see, I'll refresh the page here, each response. I see this little chart here and it gives me details. So 100% of the responses so far are pizza place, and then there is a list of things here. But in this case I want to see individual responses so I'll click on that and I'll be able to go and see the individual response here and then I can flip through them to see each one. So I can go and see what everybody responded just like they were sheets of paper. 
I can also, if I wanted to, click create a spreadsheet and Create it. This is useful because now I can click on that again and review responses. Now I can see it all in a Goggle doc spreadsheet. This Goggle doc spreadsheet will automatically update as more people fill it out. So I go back over here and say there is another person and they want to go to the restaurant and they can't come early, somebody just want to bring paper plates, and they submit.
So now I go back to the sheet here and look I didn't even have to refresh the page it automatically put it in there. So you can kind of keep this one open and watch the response roll in and easily see, okay Gary wants to bring soda, this person wants to bring paper plates, here are their email addresses, and very easily run a survey like this. It could be something for your business. It could be something personal like this. Something just for fun among your friends. It is very easy to do and it's for free by using Goggle Docs.

Comments: 12 Responses to “Creating Online Surveys”

Juli

9 years ago

Thanks so much for this! I can think of many uses for creating surveys and this is free and easy : D.

Jasper

I looked at several on line forms a few years ago and most liked JotForm.
It's also easy to use, but more versitile and produces very slick looking forms.

Gary Rosenzweig

Jasper: A key thing about using Google for this: it is free.

Robyn

Gary what a fantastic tutorial this was - lots of people are looking for this sort of thing and have no idea where to find forms.

Steve

Great tutorial. Created two survey forms for a recent Scout event. Easy to create and send, and the results are tabulated and compiled automatically. And best of all, free. Thanks for all your great videos.

Juan Carlos

Gary, I'm a teacher, do you know of a good "evaluations form", so as to use them for examinations in my class?

Juan: Sorry, I don't know enough about evaluation forms to tell you. Do they require something that you can't do with Google Forms?

I'll take another look at Google Forms for evaluation purposes. Thank you!

Linda Lyn

Thank you for showing it.
I don't even know about it.
With Gary I learn new things every time
I watch your videos. Thank you again

You can pay for extra features with jotForm (sharing and fairly large scale usage, I think) but for the occasional user it's free.

Paula

Thanks, Gary. Love all your tutorials and tips. Been a Google Form users for years, but I've been waiting for the ability to view individual responses, not just summary or spreadsheet. Is there any way to change the fonts so that the individual responses are more readable? Responses seem to be grayed out.

Paula: There should be. I haven't experienced any issues here. I can read the individual responses just fine.

Comments Closed.

Creating Online Surveys

Comments: 12 Responses to “Creating Online Surveys”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information