Paper questionnaires are beginning to fade away as there are many tools and resources available to us for free using the internet. Almost everyone who uses the internet has at least one email address and also registered on different social media platforms like Facebook, twitter and the likes, which makes it very simple and easy to connect with a large number of people online.

This article is very helpful for students and individuals who have projects to write and/or also want to conduct a research that involves collection, analysis, interpretation and reporting of data by getting feedback from a small or large group of people to draw up conclusions based on the analysis.

You can check my earlier post on Dos and Don’ts on your first day at work.

Why not choose the option of doing it at the comfort of your home, which saves time and also reduce the stress of trying to reach out to people by handing out questionnaires in hard copies, collecting them and manually input and analyze the results.

Create your questionnaires online, send them out through emails, Facebook, and other social media platforms that allows you to conveniently attach and send a file. And as soon as it is filled and submitted, it automatically update the responses and show you the result of your analysis using graphical representation and also on a spreadsheet, which is obviously very easy to interpret.

One of the easy-to-use tools in creating and analyzing surveys for free is using Google Docs.

You can check my earlier post on how to pass a job interview.

Before using this free Google online tool to create and analyze your survey, you need to have a google account and if you don’t have one, you can open it here.

After you have logged into your google account, you click on ‘Drive’ as shown below;

Click ‘New’ as shown in the image below– a drop-down with differnt tools will show and click ‘Forms’.

You can also directly go to this link to create your queationnaire after you have already signed in with your google account.

This is what you will see below;

Before you start, make sure the heading of your project is simple and very easy to understand. Click on ‘Untitled Form’ to input your title. Write a nice and short introduction under ‘Form Description’ to tell the respondents what they should expect when filling out the questionnaire.

From the pic above, at the top left hand side of the form, you will see ‘Edit Questions’, the next tab is ‘Change Theme’. When you click on ‘Change Theme’, you will see different sample themes to choose from and also, you have the option to personalize/create your theme.

After choosing the theme, click on ‘Edit Questions’ which is at the top left hand side of the page to continue creating your questionnaire.

You fill in your ‘Question Title’ – insert the question you want to ask respondents.

Next is ‘Help Text’- you can leave it blank except you need to provide additional information, if you want to keep your ‘Question Title’ short.

Then you have ‘Question Type’ – it gives you options on how you want the questions answered. When you click on the arrow close to ‘Multiple Choice’, a dropdown of different options will be shown like; Text, Multiple choice, Choose from a list, Scale and so on… Choose the appropriate type for your question. You can insert images as well.

You should also click on the small box close to ‘Required Question’ if it is a compulsory part of your survey. The respondent cannot submit the questionnaire if one of the required questions is not answered. It also helps in giving you an acurate result.

After if you have filled in your first question, click ‘Add Item’ to input the next question and when you are through with your questions, click ‘Done’.

You can always go back to edit your questions.

The next part of the form is the ‘Confirmation Page’ – Here you can include a nice way to say thank you for filling the questionnaire and click on the option(s) suitable for you.

You can take a look at the form by clicking ‘View Live Form’ which at the top left hand side of the form, it will show you a view of how the form looks like.

After you are done, click ‘Send Form’.

After clicking ‘Send Form’, a pop-up with the URL / Link to share with the respondents on different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus and you will also see the option to input email addresses.

Kindly Note: Copy and save the URL / Link.

After this step, you will be asked to select from creating a ‘New Spreadsheet’, ‘New sheet in an existing spreadsheet’ or ‘Keep responses only in Forms’.

This is what it looks like when you create a new Spreadsheet. You can always view it when you open google drive.

If you also want to see the responses in a graphical form, on the page where you input your questions, you will responses and then click on it – choose ‘summary of responses’ and it will show you something like this;

From this result you can easily draw up the conclusion for your report.

Kindly drop your questions, suggestions and reccomendation in the comment section below.

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