MacMost Now 786: Using Google Forms To Create Questionnaires

It is quick and easy to create an online survey using Google Drive. You can simply add some questions to a form and then publish it, sending the link to the people you wish to take the survey. You can then get the results in a spreadsheet. It is so easy to create one of these that you can use them to help with all sorts of work, school or personal tasks.

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

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let me show you how to use Goggle Drive to build a questionnaire. 
So I'm sure that just about everybody has run into the situation where they want to ask a lot of people certain questions. Either they want to take a survey or just ask people's opinions on something or plan a party. Well, you can do that pretty easily using the free Goggle Drive formally known as Goggle dock service. Let me show you how.
Now all I've done here is to log onto my Goggle account, the same as your Gmail account if you use that, and go to drive.goggle.com. Now once you're there you have all the documents that are part of your Goggle Drive. So you can have word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc. Let's create a new one by hitting the Create button here and let's create it of type Form. 
So right away you can see here I've got a form that is already set up for me to ask questions. So let's create a sample one here. Let's call it Holiday Party and we'll ask people's opinions on the company or school holiday party. Let's make the first question something like theme. Now we get to have a question also some help text. Some extra text when they roll over the question. We get to select the question type. 
So we're going to do a multiple choice. We can do like holiday as the first option. You simple click to add an option there, winter, New Year. Then maybe we can add Other to it. So you have the typical thing where you can select other and enter your own answer. Then you can select whether or not this is a required question they have to answer. So hit Done here and now it automatically gives us a sample question 2. So let's click in there and ask that. So let's ask what type of food. Let's also make this multiple choice and say pizza, sandwiches, buffet, desserts only. And let's just make those the only options there. Scroll up and hit Done.
Now to add more questions just go here to Add item and you can see you have all the different things you can do here. There is all sorts of cool stuff you can do like adding a scale or a grid, choosing from a list, having check boxes. Like when you do a check box here and we can say party options. Allow each person to invite a guest. This will simply be a check box here. We can add more checkboxes to the same thing. So you can add a whole different set of options.
Then we could add paragraph text like, let me know your ideas, that type of thing. So a lot of different things we can do here. We can even do a scale. Say what should the budget for it be and have it scale up and down.
When you are done with this you can do some other cool stuff. You can see here on the upper right, for instance, we can add a theme. So let's go over here and add a theme. It is going to give us some basic themes. So let's go and create this garden theme here. So now we can see there is fonts and colors associated with this. So let's Apply that then to it. 
We can also see there is more actions. We can see responses. We haven't even posted it yet. So you can click here at the bottom and there is a link and there is a link at the bottom there to URL for this form. We can also hit Email this form and we see we can actually send it to a bunch of people. So you can send it to your company list. You can share it on Goggle+ and also you can embed it in a web page so on your company or school web site or your own personal web site. You can also edit the confirmation. What happens when it's over and the person has taken the survey or whether or not they should see the results so far. In this case it doesn't quite make sense. Hit the save button there if you haven't recently saved the options.
If we go back here to Goggle Drive we can see that the Holiday Party is actually part of our Goggle Drive there now.
So let's say we send this to people and they click on the link in their Email and this is what it will look like. So let's select some options here. Winter, sandwiches, yes and submit. You can see your response has been recorded. We go to Goggle Drive here and click on Holiday Party. It is going to open up a spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet you will see all the results here, with a time stamp even. So you will be able to quickly see all the results. Then if you are in here, you can go to the form thing, and you can actually edit form which will allow you to go back in and edit the survey again. It is kind of tricky how to get back there and that is how you do it.
So it allows you to quickly make a cool survey, cool questionnaire, send it to your friends, send it to you coworkers,  school mates or your web site visitors for instance. Even beta testers have used this for beta testing IOS games and having people fill out questionnaires afterwards and get all the results here.
So there is some great things about this. First of all it is free. It is just part of Goggle's free services like Gmail. Second of all, it alleviates the whole thing of having to send out like emails to thirty people and then get thirty different responses and having to figure out, you know tabulate the results. You get this all in a spreadsheet so you can do it a lot easier and you don't get all these emails back from people. You just simplyHi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode I want to show you how to fill cells in Numbers.
So I'm often asked how do you fill cells in Numbers. For instance you may want to copy and then paste a number into multiple cells, you may want to have them automatically fill as you expand a spreadsheet. There is all sorts of different ways to fill cells in Numbers. So let's look at them all.
Here is a standard blank spreadsheet. The most common thing you may want to do is to simply fill a series of cells with the same number. So here I have put a number into a cell, I'm going to select it, and then select Edit and then Copy or Command C. Then I'm going to select a series of cells. I can do that by selecting one and then shift selecting another. You can also drag the little dot here at the bottom right hand corner and select your area. Then I'm going to Edit and Paste, or Command V. You can see it simply fills all those cells with that same number. I can select an area, paste it and it will do it like that.
Now this also works if you have a series of cells and even if there is formulas in them. So for instance this first cell here is just a number and then there is another number and this third cell here is actually a formula adding these two together. Now if I select all of them, Command Shift and select all three there, and I Command C (copy), then I select say the cell below that and Shift Select there to select that whole area, and I Paste, you can see that it pasted it all in. It is not pasting the number there in the last cell, it is actually pasting the formula, shifting it down as you would expect. So I can Undo that there and select say only that cell, copy, select a bunch of cells here, paste and you can see it is a bunch of zeros because this on here is trying to add these two together. I can put values in them and you can see it will adjust according to those values.
Now let's do this taking the entire table into consideration. I've got a large table here. I'm going to shrink it down to just the size I need. I'm going to insert an extra Footer Row here. It is very common to want to have totals. So for instance, let's shrink this all the way so that I just have one sample row here and put this as the -sum of everything in B, and then I'm actually going to copy that and paste that here, and sum of B and sum of C, and sum of D. Then I'm going to make this a formula where it takes this number and adds this number to it. So now I can put two values in here and you can see that it fills it in properly. Now what would be nice if it automatically filled in this formula here as I expanded and if I drag down and expand you can see that it is exactly what it does. It is smart enough to realize that I've got a formula here and it's going to add that to every row that I add. So as I increase the table size it will just add it in. So I can start adding in new numbers and it will automatically do that. 
I can shrink the table back down, say if I added too many and it will automatically do it if I select it properly. Oh, it actually looks like it is locked in place. So I can't actually remove these rows here, I can only add new ones to it. Which is probably the best way to do it. You can still select and I am sure delete these. You can see I am deleting the selected rows. So it is not going to let you easily remove data that you have added but you can still do it by deleting. 
So the automatic filling here, you can see how well it works as long as you set the table up correctly.
Now you also have some other options. For instance if I have a number here in the table I can select that number and a bunch of other cells. I can go to Insert/Fill and you can see Fill Down has been selected. I can copy that number into all of them. Look what happens if I put two different numbers here and I select a whole bunch of cells. Then I Insert/Fill and Fill Down and you can see that it's actually going to always take that first cell. Likewise if I did Fill and Fill Up it will take that bottom cell and fill it up. So you want to be careful when doing that. Likewise I can fill across, so I can Fill and Fill Right and it will put those numbers there as well. This works for formulas which of course where it really is useful. So if I put this formula here and now I select and I say Insert/Fill/Fill Down you can see its doing the same thing that the Copy and Paste would have done but just another way of doing it using the Menu/Insert/Fill.
Now here is something really cool that you can do. You can fill with patterns. It works pretty intuitively. For instance if I put the word January there and I simply grab the bottom right hand corner of that and drag down, look what happens. All the months appear. It will even repeat. The same thing will happen for the days of the week. Or if I were to do say a pattern like 1, 2, 3 and then select all of it like that and then drag, it knows the pattern and will repeat it. You can do this horizontally or vertically. You can even do it with text. For instance, A, B, I can select both of those and drag down and it will continue the alphabet. 
Now one more note about filling in formulas. Say I want a formula here that is this cell plus this cell and I also want a constant. I want to add something automatically like a sales charge to a list of sales. I want to put that number here. So you can see B2 plus C2 plus G2. Now if I were to copy this and paste it below you can see that it is B3 plus C3 plus G3. But I want this to be a constant. I want to put a number here like 1.5 and have that always added to each one. What I am going to do is go into this formula and click on the G2 in the formula and change it to make it an absolute row and column. So that means it is absolute. I will always link to G2 no matter where I copy and paste this. So I am going to copy and paste it below here. As a matter of fact I am going to do it a bunch of times. You can see it is always 1.5. It's going to do say 4 +5 and 6 plus, and just do a whole bunch of different ones to fill in. You can see it is always adding in, there B2 plus C2 plus G2. Then B3 plus C3 plus G2. So it is always going to use this number in every version of this formula. It is not going to go sequentially down as I copy and paste the formula. So that really comes in handy for a lot more advanced stuff.
So there is a lot of different ways to fill in cells in Numbers without actually having to enter in the value over and over again.
Hope you found this useful. This is Gary with MacMost Now. go and checkout the result in the spreadsheet and you can print it out, you can export it from Goggle Docks or process it there. Use the spreadsheet functions to run calculations. For instance if I had asked what the budget should be for the party. I could have simple calculated an average from that. 
So there is a lot of cool useful things. Tons of uses for this and you saw how easy it was for me to actually create one of these. So you can just create one for just any reason that you need a survey or quick questionnaire without having to worry about putting too much work into it. 
Hope you found this useful. Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 6 Responses to “MacMost Now 786: Using Google Forms To Create Questionnaires”

Matthew famolare

12 years ago

Great piece as always! You always hit on very useful subjects, thanks again, i look forward to your next installment

Nilesh Parmar

This is good for free. I use Acrobat Forms Central for better layouts but obviously not free though. This is a great alternative, thanks.

Can you add images on the Google Forms?

Gary Rosenzweig

Not sure. But there are tons of options, so I wouldn't be surprised. Try it.

Linda Lyn

Hey Gary 20.11.12

I'm glad that I have come to know you through your website.
I have no not know a second person like you so willing to share your knowledge, so freely and you had so much ideas and ways of teaching how to do computer to do new things. Share knowledge is a way to eternity.

The users of your website comments are both creative and plusitive
By reading their comments is a good learning experience. thank you all for the sharing and learning with MacMost.

Gary
You are a shining gem, if the world have more people like you
Our world would be a better place to live.

Thank you sincerely for sharing your ideas and your teaching.

Linda Lyn
Victoria Australia

Thanks!!

Nancy S.

Thank you! Thank you! for telling me about the questionnaire possibilities on Google Drive. I love it, and it is just what I have been looking for to use for my newsletter that I have been writing for 40+ years.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 786: Using Google Forms To Create Questionnaires

Comments: 6 Responses to “MacMost Now 786: Using Google Forms To Create Questionnaires”

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