A questionnaire question

[silverback]

A friend has just accepted the job of secretary of a voluntary organisation (U3A) which has a large population of elderly members. As such, there is a very wide disparity in MS Office and Windows versions.

She has to send out questionnaires every now and then; ideally, she wants people to be able to complete the questionnaires online so they can send them back via email.
With her first questionnaire, she forgot about the version problem and sent out a .docx document, only to receive lots of complaints from people who could not open it. When she saved the document in .doc format, she got an error?/warning? saying that content and format might be lost in the Save - but not identifying which areas might be lost. I've tried saving a Word form via CutePDF, but this doesn't allow edits/updates to the PDF file. Of course, I may not have set appropriate options to allow this but I can't find anything that says this is possible anyway.

So the question is what's the best solution to sending out a questionnaire, which can be filled in and returned online, to this disparate community, please?

Thanks
Silverback.

[Rebel]

The simplest procedure would be to have your friend open the original document (.docx) and then save a copy of it as a .doc file (disregard any warnings). Open the .doc file and observe any inconsistencies or discrepancies in the new document. If there are any, then she should be able to modify the .doc file to correct anything that may not work properly. I'm sure that a relatively simple document such as a questionnaire will not generate any major errors in content or format.

[StuartR]

I wouldn't send them an office document at all. It's much easier to use a tool like SurveyMonkey.

[Rudi]

I agree with Stuart.
One cannot go wrong with an online questionnaire, especially if there are multiple versions and maybe some people don't even have MS Office?

The free version of Survey Monkey could be limiting with only 10 questions. Others online surveys offer unlimited questions for free.
Others to experiment with can be found here: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/ ... rvey-tools

Some good ones are: TypeForm, Google Forms and KwikSurveys

[silverback]

I wouldn't send them an office document at all. It's much easier to use a tool like SurveyMonkey.

A big to everyone who has replied to this post. Rebel's post was very much along the lines that we were thinking but Stuart's posting set the brain cells going. I was not even aware that there is survey software around, so I had a look at SurveyMonkey, googled for it and - bizarrely - found a Wikipedia entry. To cut a long story short, this entry led to a list of available survey software and we started to play with Google Forms. The lady in question is overjoyed with this, as it is very easy to set up a questionaire, is web based and very easy to respond to. So I think she's going to go with Google Play. It satisfies all that she wanted and even more, especially the way it handles responses.
So thanks for opening our eyes to 21st century software capabilities. The Lounge - and its amazing members - wins again!

Many Thanks to Rebel, Stuart and Rudi.
Silverback

[StuartR]

Thanks for the update. That sounds like a great result.

[Rudi]

...So I think she's going to go with Google Play...

You'd better keep your eye on her that she doesn't get too involved in Google Play! She might forget completely to set up the Google Forms!?

[silverback]

...So I think she's going to go with Google Play...

You'd better keep your eye on her that she doesn't get too involved in Google Play! She might forget completely to set up the Google Forms!?

Good spot, Rudi.
Have a
Silverback

[John Gray]

For future information, the document format that would be most generally acceptable to both Windows and Mac computers is Revisable Text Format, .rtf, but you should avoid including any graphics or photos therein, because they bump up the resulting file size quite significantly!