How to create an online survey with #Excel?
Did you know that we can conduct online survey by using Excel? Yes, you heard me right. I said: Excel! I am not talking about setting up questionnaire in Excel and then send the Excel file to respondents. Of course we can do that, but are you sure you want to do the consolidation afterwards. I do not for sure!
What I am talking about is to create an online survey and then send a link to respondents to collect their responses. (Access to internet is, of course, required)
And the cool thing is… all the responses submitted will be loaded into an Excel table stored in your One Drive. You can imagine how many hours could be saved from consolidating the responses. 😛
So, how to create an online survey in Excel?
1. Sign in your Microsoft account (e.g. Hotmail)
Note: Create one if you don’t have one yet.
2. Go to Excel
3. Start a New blank workbook
4. Let’s rename the filename to ExcelOnlineSurvey
(Optional but always a good practice to name your file)
5. Home tab –> Survey –> New Survey
5.1 This is where we start to create our survey
5.2 Continue edit the survey by inputting title and description
(although this is optional, I recommend you do input something meaningful to you and your respondents)
5.3 Enter questions
- Question: Highly recommend you use short but meaningful description here as this will become the column header of your resulting table
- Question Subtitle: Here you may enter a longer qualitative question that is meaningful to your respondents
- Response Type: Text, Paragraph text, Number, Date, Time, Yes/No, Choice. This is indeed quite straight forward. See demo below for different types.
- Required: If this box is checked, it means that respondent cannot leave it blank in order to submit the survey successfully.
- Default answer: Optional
5.4 Add New Question and repeat step 5.3 above
See below for demonstration:
5.5 When finished, click Save and View
This is the moment to check your questions and answer options.
I’d checked the “required” box for the second question. That’s why I cannot leave it blank…
Let’s see what is happening when I submitted an answered survey:
WOW…. did you see? The responses were captured instantly:
Tip: See the column headers? These are what we input in “Question” and that’s why I recommended to use short terms.
6. Let’s share the survey
Note: you may continue edit the survey if needed
7. Copy the link and send it to respondents for input
Note: You may “Stop sharing this survey” any time by clicking that… 🙂
8. To view/edit the responses, go back to Online Excel and open the corresponding file
(Note: You won’t find the “SAVE” command in Excel Online as it is always saved.)
Yeah! As simple as this. 🙂
Let’s create your own online survey using Excel next time.
Use cases discussion
When there are so many online survey providers on the Internet, why do we still use Excel Online to conduct survey? Please share your views in comments.
wmfexcel 