How To Use Google Forms to Conduct a Survey

This post describes how to use the form feature of Google Spreadsheets to conduct a survey. But, before getting into that, I want to make these points:

• Before conducting a survey, you should always ask yourself what you are willing to change as a result of the survey. This means really knowing what you really expect to accomplish in the first place. I have more to say on this below.
• If you are going to be doing a massive survey, I am not convinced that Google Spreadsheets is the way to go. If you are going to be dealing with hundreds or even thousands of responses, pouring through a spreadsheet to make sense of them is not the way to go. You probably want software that does a lot of the work for you and that has a statistics package built into it as well. But, Google Spreadsheets can work well for smaller surveys.

As to my point about knowing what you really expect to accomplish before surveying, my recent reader survey is a perfect example of this. (The survey form is located here so you can see an example.) My heart was in the right place with it, and I put out the survey, thinking I would make whatever changes to my blogging style that seemed appropriate based on the results.

But, as the results started coming in, I saw that a lot of people want this to be a technology-only blog. And, the bottom line is: I am not willing to go there. I do not want to be a technology blogger. I’ll be 59 in June and my interest in technology is limited to how it helps me do what I want to do. Oh, I do love technology, mind you. I am a retired engineer after all. But it is not my primary focus in life.

So, I will continue to focus on articles related to managing your life, with some tips on how to use technology thrown in from time to time. I’ll probably also write a few other types of thought pieces.

I should have realized this before the survey. Realizing it after the survey makes it look like I blew off the results of the survey, and I did not. I paid attention to it, and I am glad I did it. But, my key point to you is: be sure you know what you really want to do before you ask others for input. Sometimes it takes both, though. Sometimes you have to ask for input to be able to figure out what you want to do, which was the case with me.

Now, for some details on how to use the form capability of Google Spreadsheets.

The first step is to set up a Google Docs account, if you don’t already have one. Just point your browser to docs.google.com to get started.

Once you have an account, choose Spreadsheets from the sidebar listing of document-type options and click to create a new spreadsheet. Once you do that, look at the menus along the top, and select “Share,” as illustrated below:

From this menu you will want to select “to fill out a form” and “Anyone can view this document at.” Clicking the latter will give you a link that you can give to those who are to participate in the survey.

Then you start filling out your form. As indicated in the picture below, you have an option for each survey item on whether you want it to be multiple choice, checkboxes, etc.

Then you just create each survey item. One of mine is shown below as an example.

That’s pretty much all there is to it. When you are done you just save the file and use the link mentioned above to make it available to participants. Then, as survey results come in, you can see them show up on the spreadsheet:

Pretty nifty, huh? And it does not cost anything to do it (except your time, of course).