Excerpt from:  FAS Talk
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August 31, 2008

Google Docs Replaces Survey Monkey

For simple data collection, Google Docs is a practical (and free) alternative to SurveyMonkey.com.

For a long time, we've used SurveyMonkey.com to create simple online questionnaires.  But from the beginning there was one gotcha that always bugged me... SurveyMonkey.com does not offer any means of notification--no e-mail, no RSS, no API, nothing.  As a results, we were continually logging into SurveyMonkey.com to see if we had any new submissions.

Well, a couple weeks ago, we went a few days without checking and, as Murphy would suggest, we failed to notice a new RSS feed order for a few days.  That was the straw the broke the camel's back.  I went looking for an alternative solution--and I found a great one in Google Docs spreadsheets.

As it turns out, its is very easy to create a web form to that captures results into a Google Docs spreadsheet.  And since Google Docs provides a flexible mechanism for e-mail notification, sharing access with other users, online backup, access to data in multiple formats, this turned out to be a much better solution than SurveyMonkey.com.

So, with very little effort, I replaced the MyST Enterprise RSS Setup Questionnaire with a form that feeds into a secure Google Docs spreadsheet.  Now, the right folks within MyST get e-mail notification the moment a new submission occurs.

If you're looking for an easy-to-use form capture mechanism, take a look at Google Docs spreadsheets.

Comments
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Google Docs Survey

How-To's ?
I've read on several other boards that one of the main differences between the two services is that SurveyMonkey allows the survey to be taken only once per address.  Can this be done in Google?
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Google Docs as Form Capture

@Annie: I'm not sure if there is a way to limit number of responses per address.

Our requirements have been for basic form data capture and we were using SurveyMonkey because it provided a really simple form layout and publishing mechanism. I've not had the requirement to limit responses--I actually wanted multiple responses in most cases--so I've never investigated your question with respect to Google Docs.

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