How to Create a Contact Page or a Survey Feedback Form using Google Docs

Does you job involve collecting surveys and feedbacks? How do you do that? Do you send emails to your team, asking for reviews and manually enter into a sheet? or have a centralized excel sheet and ask everyone to update? – Now let me tell you, thats one sad way of doing., and I reckon.. even you will agree on that!

Now lets come to bloggers/Authors – Most of us have blogs and we all need our readers to connect with us, either for Questions or comments (compliments too..!). For this purpose we use plugins and embed it in our WordPress/Blogspot blogs. Most of the times, you need to create an account in the plugin site and you really are not sure, if the same plugin will work, when you do a blog update. (WordPress has frequent updates!!). Thats the compatiblity crisis!

This is where exactly, Google Docs can help you! Docs is a free service from Google, which provides you the same functionalities of Word, Excel and PowerPoint online. This means, you dont need Office to be installed on your machine. All you need is Internet and just your gmail id (I guess, everyone has it by now.!)

Ten Simple Steps to Create a  Contact Page or a Survey Feedback form

Step 1: Login with your gmail id, at http://docs.google.com/

Step 2: Once you login, you will have a workspace area to work with your documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Just below the logo, you will find the “Create New” button, when you click on that, you will have all the available options. Select Form there.

Step 3: This will create a new clean Form Wizard for you. Using this window, you can name your survey/contact page name, quote a description for it. and Start writing questions. You also have a Help text option, here to make your user understand what this field in this form is all about. For eg: Question Title – “Enter Emp id:” , The help text can be – “Enter the number, which you have on your badge :”

Step 4: The beauty of this forms is that, you have options to choose what type of answer are you expecting from the user. So its not just mere Text boxes. You can have Multiple Choice, Checkboxes, Choosing from list, Scale option, Grid etc.. Once you complete the Question number 1. You can click on the add question box, which you see on the form below to add one more question. A nice cool thing is that, you can make some questions mandatory too.!

Step 5: Once you have completed all the questions, you can also edit the confirmation message. This is the text which the end user will see after taking the survey. You can add your custom text and company details here!

Step 6: You can also choose, how do you want the responses to be shown. whether as a Summary graph or a SpreadSheet. It depends on what your need is! For eg: If you are writing a survey to ask, how many is fine to attend a function? – The summary response works. But, if your questions are more user centric and you need individual thoughts and opinions, Spreadsheet is a better option.

Step 7: Now, this completes the phase 1 of Designing Form. Now lets drill onto doing some backend activities. A place where you set, a notification alert.. when someone completes a survey (or) when someone asks you something in your Contact page. For this, get back to Workspace, and click open the SpreadSheet which is present in your workarea (This will be of the same name of the Survey form). Goto, Tools  -> Notification Rules

Step 8: This below dialog gets displayed when you select that. Here you have options to choose whether you wanna’ have a notification rule or not. Select Edit here

Step 9: This is the place where you will setting your notification rules. For example, I have selected for a notification, when someone makes any change to this sheet (which is caused, when he submits the survey). You can choose, whether do you want an instant email or a summary – Daily digest email (not Instant).  I have choosen, right away here.

Step 10: Now you are all set to distribute this survey/contact page form. Click on Email this form, if you want to send this form as an email to all yourt team members. Bloggers and Authors, can select the Embed option. This will give you a HTML script tag, which you need to add it to your contact me page.

That’s it..You are all done.! Once when people do submit the comments/surveys/questions, you can see it in the SpreadSheet from the WorkArea. For eg: I have attached my spreadsheet which I get from my Contact Me page. Its Slick..!

Well, I am no different!! Even I have used Google Docs for my Contact Me page -  You will know how have I implemented it…., May be you can do it much better way than what I did.!

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