Survey Tool

Thanks to the generosity of Virginia Tech, the college is able to provide its faculty, staff, and students an easy to use survey tool. If you want to create and run an online survey or establish a web-based form, this survey tool is the answer. This tool is fully web-based and allows you to design the look and feel of a survey and collect, view and export the responses.

The tool can be accessed with any web browser at http://helpdesk.oneonta.edu/survey/. Data analysis capabilities are limited for the survey tool. Therefore it is recommended to use a secondary tool like Microsoft Excel if you need to perform data manipulation (see exporting and importing into Excel instructions below).
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Logging in and creating a new survey:

You will first be asked to login in order to use the survey tool. Your Oneonta username and email password is all you need to gain access.

Logging in takes you to a screen that allows you to create a new survey. Click on the "Create new survey" button to continue.

Enter a name to identify your survey that is no longer than 30 characters and click "OK". Once created, you will see that survey's main dashboard:

Editing the survey form:

Clicking on the "Edit Entry Form" link will allow you to add or edit a question. You may also include additional text to explain the purpose of the survey or each individual question by click the "add text here" link.

The exit page is what is seen after the answers to the survey have been submitted. It lets the user know they have completed the survey successfully. By default the exit page looks like the following, but clicking the "edit exit page text" link will let you change this text.

Changing E-mail Notification:

By entering an e-mail address under "change e-mail notification", this address will receive a notification any time a new entry arrives.

Add/Remove administrators:

You may give administrative access to your survey to any other person with a College username. This is very useful if you have a secretary or TA working with you. If you receive the message Error! This person is currently not a user of Survey, the user must first log in to the tool, which will make create their survey account automatically, at which time you may add them as an administrator.

Editing Entry Restrictions:

You are able to control are restrict the users who may submit answers to your survey by choosing no of the follow options. By default, the entry level is set to public.

Opening and closing the survey:

Before a survey can collect data you have to start it by clicking on "open for data collection". Once the survey is open you can e-mail the link to the entry form (which is displayed after choosing "open for data collection") to whoever you like or add the link to your website.

You can view and export the survey results as soon as the survey is started - you don't need to close it beforehand. The tool simply lists the survey results. If you need more advanced data analysis (e.g., calculation of averages etc.) you should export the data to a data analysis tool like Microsoft Excel.

The entry form can only be changed when the survey is closed for data collection. If you need to do any changes you have to close the survey first ("close for data collection") and restart it afterwards. Even when the survey is closed, the entry form can only be changed if it does not contain any entries/results. If you already collected some results you have two options. Your first option is to delete the existing results ("Delete results"). Before deletion you should consider to export these results (instructions below) and keep them for later reference. Your second option is to create a copy of your survey and proceed using this copy. Be aware that creating a copy will change the URL/address of the form. You will have to change any links that point to the survey or send e-mail to people about the new URL/address.

Changing access restrictions:

By default, you are the only one who can view the survey results. However, you can allow the general public to view the results or restrict it to a group of people who know the password that you can define under "Change access restrictions". The following shows the options.

The results:

You can view the results of your survey on-line by click the "View Results" link. You can also export the results to a delimited file that can be imported into an application like Microsoft Excel.

Embedding pictures into a survey:

To add pictures to the entry form or exit page of a survey you need to use HTML. You can embed arbitrary HTML code by clicking on one of the "add text" buttons on the "Edit entry form" screen. On the Edit screen you should switch from "plain text" to "HTML" and then enter the HTML code. For example, this is the HTML code required to insert the VT logo:

<img src="http://employees.oneonta.edu/username/surveylogo.gif" alt="AHF logo" width="118" height="26">

You cannot store pictures in the Survey Tool itself. Instead, copy your pictures onto any webserver or web hosting service that you have access to (e.g., your individual Faculty webspace) and reference that image in the "src=..." part of the HTML (e.g., "http://employees.oneonta.edu/username/images/surveylogo.gif").

Changing the design of the form:

You can make a form created with the survey tool appear as an integral part of your website by defining a custom header and footer. To add the HTML code of your custom header and footer click on the "edit layout, font, colors" button in the upper right of the "Edit entry form" screen.

A good way to add the correct HTML code is a copy and paste from your existing website. You can read more about that in the section above, Embedding pictures into a survey.

After you have created your form and have made it look like your own website, you can simply link from your website to the form address (which is displayed after choosing "open for data collection").

Exporting results (and saving them to your computer) in Internet Explorer 8+

1. Click on the survey name from the “My Surveys” page
2. Click on Export Results (into Excel, SAS, SPSS etc.)
3. Make sure semi-colon is selected as your delimiter, click ok
4. Click on the link Click here to display the data in a pop-up window
5. In the new window, press Ctrl+A on your keyboard, which will select all text within the window. Press Ctrl+C on your keyboard to copy the contents to your clipboard.
6. Open a new Word document. Press Ctrl+V on your keyboard to paste the contents from your clipboard.
7. In Word, go to File > Save As, and navigate to Other Formats under Formats and choose Plain Text.
8. Save the file to your desktop (or another folder).

Importing results into Microsoft Excel

1. In Excel, open a blank document* and go to Data > Get External Data > Import Text File
2. Choose the file you created in the above steps from your desktop (or other folder)
3. Check Delimited and click Next
4. Check Semi-Colon and click Finish
5. Click OK to add your data beginning in row A, column 1.
6. Save the file to your desktop (or another folder).

*If you would like to append new results to an existing spreadsheet (from a previous export of the same survey), open that Excel file, put your cursor in the first empty row in column A, and then continue following the same steps above. Step #5 will reflect the empty cell your cursor is in (rather than =$A$1).