How to Create Survey And Feedback Forms Using Google Docs

Google Docs make it very easy to create survey forms for your website or blog. If you want to get feedback from your site visitors, Google Docs is one of the best options to choose from.

Advantages of Google Docs Survey Templates

While there are many third party sites which lets you create survey forms and templates for free, I would prefer using Google Docs for two reasons.

First, the submissions and data are stored in your Gmail account and can be accessed quickly. You don’t have to sign up in another website, learn the procedure and use the survey form on your site.

The second advantage of using Google docs for survey forms is that the entire data can be exported in an Excel CSV format, you can then use several Excel formulas or functions to find a particular submission.

Another neat thing about these forms is that they can be edited later and embedded anywhere in your website, just copy the embed code and insert it in the source of your website’s page. No plugins or other customizations are required.

Google Docs Template Gallery

The Google Docs template gallery consists of a wide variety of already available templates to choose from. There are templates for students, teachers, resumes, calendars, organizations and so on. Following is a list of Google docs survey templates:

Blank Survey Template:  This is a very basic template which you can use to create a simple survey form with Google Docs. The available questions consists of check boxes, drop down options, a small comment form and different text fields. After you add this template in your Google docs account, you can add more questions and items to the form.

Student Survey Template: This template is a very good option if you are trying to get feedback from a group of students. The available questions are related to different courses, languages and it gives a brief idea how a student survey form should be like.

Company Survey template: This is a nice survey template for a small company or business organization. If you want to get real estate feedback about your companies performance, business policies or any other metric, use this one.

Consumer insights survey template: If you sell a product and want to get feedback on how your customers rate your product, this docs template will certainly help. You can read the sample questions and modify them to suit your companies products, then embed the template in your blog or website.

A collaborative template for writers: If you want to enquire about writers and want to aggregate the portfolio of different users in a single form, use this one.

There are many more pre made sample forms and survey templates available in the Google docs template gallery, just search using proper keywords and use the template which matches closely to your requirements.

How to Create a Survey/ Feedback Form using Google Docs

If you want something very specific and want to create the survey form with your own questions and design, go to docs.google.com and choose “Create New Form”.

This will open a sample page where you can customize the survey form and add your own questions. You can also add a meaningful title to the form and add a description, this will be useful to describe what your survey is all about.

The questions can be of different types, the available options are – multiple choices, descriptive text, selection, choose from a list and so on. If you want to make a question as “Required question”, remember to select the check box “Make this a required question”.

You can also modify the design of your survey template by clicking the “Theme” button. There are a wide variety of themes, but I would prefer the default one for simplicity and better readability.

Once you are done adding all the questions to your survey form and want to embed it in your blog, click the “More actions” dropdown menu and select “Embed”. Next, copy the iframe code and add it to the source of your website’s template.

Now that the survey or feedback form is live on your website, your site visitors can start submitting information and each time someone inputs a result, you will get an email notification straight to your Gmail inbox. Later, you can download the entire spreadsheet of answers and responses as an Excel document.

If you are a student or a jobseeker, make sure to check out some Google Docs resume and cover letter samples

Watch The Video Screencast

Here is a short video demonstration on how you can create forms in Google Docs:

Example: We have a very basic survey form created using Google Docs on this website. Please visit the feedback page to see the form and give your valuable feedback.

More Tips on Google Docs:

1. How to use Google Docs for publishing blog posts
2. How to create or edit Google Docs documents from Microsoft office
3. Use Google Docs to create pie charts and diagrams