{"id":295,"date":"2008-08-23T03:34:01","date_gmt":"2008-08-23T08:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/?p=295"},"modified":"2008-08-23T03:34:01","modified_gmt":"2008-08-23T08:34:01","slug":"create-a-survey-or-poll-for-your-blog-with-google-docs-and-spreadsheets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2008\/create-a-survey-or-poll-for-your-blog-with-google-docs-and-spreadsheets\/","title":{"rendered":"Create a survey or poll for your blog with Google Docs and Spreadsheets"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may have noticed the snazzy poll I posted<\/a> on my blog the other day.\u00a0 There’s a number of different survey and poll plugins for WordPress but all the ones I’ve looked at have caveats and limitations.\u00a0 You can also use a service like SurveyMonkey<\/a> but it has some data limitations for free accounts.\u00a0 Instead, I used Google Docs and Spreadsheets to create a survey quickly and easily.\u00a0 Here’s how to do it.<\/p>\n

1. Getting to Google Docs and starting your form<\/h3>\n

We’re going to assume you have a Gmail account or have signed up for some other Google service already.\u00a0 Go to http:\/\/docs.google.com<\/a>.\u00a0 Click on New -> Form<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 Creating your form<\/h3>\n

This is actually pretty easy, and the online help does a pretty good job explaining what to do.\u00a0 You have a number of options when creating a question – you can make it multiple choice, full text, or even a numerical scale, and you can mark some questions as required.\u00a0 If you’re looking for the “Add question” button, it’s up at the top of the page rather than below the last question.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0 Publishing the survey on your site<\/h3>\n

After you’ve created your form, use the More Actions button to find the Embed option.\u00a0 Just copy this iframe into your blog post – it’s that simple. You’ll get code that looks something like this:<\/p>\n

<iframe src=”http:\/\/spreadsheets.google.com\/embeddedform?key=ppevxmL24UqnRb77Xy3AOWg” width=”310″ height=”1044″ frameborder=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″>Loading…<\/iframe><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can change the height and weight to better fit your blog template.\u00a0 Keep in mind that some blogging software will not let you post HTML code and others, like WordPress, require you to use the HTML view.<\/p>\n

If you can edit your template or sidebar you can even include the poll on every page, instead of just putting it in a post.<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0 Getting data<\/h3>\n

Here’s where it gets really cool – the data is automatically collected into a spreadsheet that you can share, edit online, or export to Microsoft Excel.\u00a0 It’s pretty easy to export CSV for a statistical package like SPSS too.<\/p>\n

There’s an optional fifth step, creating a chart or graph to let your users see the results, that I’ll cover later.\u00a0 If you can’t wait just jump back to my post about urban usability<\/a> and read about how I created the time-series chart there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may have noticed the snazzy poll I posted on my blog the other day.\u00a0 There’s a number of different survey and poll plugins for WordPress but all the ones I’ve looked at have caveats and limitations.\u00a0 You can also use a service like SurveyMonkey but it has some data limitations for free accounts.\u00a0 Instead, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[465,463,80,288,315,88,124,462,478,464,461,477,110],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-csv","tag-excel","tag-google","tag-google-docs","tag-google-spreadsheets","tag-how-to","tag-plugins","tag-poll","tag-questionnaire","tag-spss","tag-survey","tag-surveymonkey","tag-wordpress"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions\/317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}