How to Use Google Docs to Create Polls and Surveys
Sometimes a joke leads to something useful… At least that’s the excuse I’m using to justify the time I’ve spent playing around with Twitter, Google Docs, and ScreenFlow while I’m on vacation. 
“Right! Now let’s have a proper screencast!”
You see, yesterday, I ran a little survey on Awesome Mustache to gauge the reaction of the Twitterverse to Chris Brogan’s recent face shaving. Admittedly, this is a silly reason to run a survey but it was better than musing about “Twitter Authority.”
As it was a silly thing, I wasn’t going to pay a nickel to collect the data. I didn’t want to install any software either. So, I decided to use the Forms feature of Google Docs.
When you create a form in Google Docs, you can embed the form in a web page, email it, or use the standalone page to collect responses. Responses are stored in a Google Docs spreadsheet and there is also a nice little summary report available complete with charts. This was perfect for my needs.
Here is the form embedded in a post on Awesome Mustache and here are the survey results, sliced up in my follow-up post.
After this went out, I received a few questions about creating the survey, so I whipped up this little screencast demo using ScreenFlow on my Mac. Sorry if it isn’t the most polished of demos but I think you’ll find everything you need to jump into Google Docs Forms and make your own poll or survey:
*Go full screen on this so that you can see the menu choices and such.
[...] [Note: See the "Making of" video if you want to learn how to use Google Docs Forms to create surveys/polls.] [...]
Oh that was awesome. Now I want to know how to make one of those videos.
Thanks for this video. I tried some paid sites for making surveys online and it was way too much money for something simple. For a while I have been using http://www.cafesurvey.com since it is free and pretty easy to pick out what you want. I like this Google Docs way also because it is so easy to generate all the reports and graphs that I want right in the same page. Please post another blog if you have any other recommendations for taking surveys online!
Nice demo, Jamie. A friend of mine is working on a site to organize some instructors and classes he coordinates. I’ll send him here to check out Google Docs as a good solution. This presentation is going to be very helpful for him.