Survey Galaxy Enhancements Roundup

A number of enhancements to the Survey Galaxy website were released recently, this entry highlights some of them.

Create Survey From Template

We have always provided you with the ability to use templates to create your surveys but we have now added a field to the 'Create a New Survey' display to allow you to pre-populate a new survey with all the items from a selected template.




This option is in addition to Survey Galaxy's ability to allow you to select specific elements from any number of survey templates so that you can insert single or multiple items into your survey exactly where you want them.

Our Enterprise subscribers enjoy the benefits of having templates that are shared across the account making it ideal for ensuring that there is a consistency when it comes to look and feel as well as increasing productivity such as having the organisation's specific department and disciplines already setup to use.

If you are not familiar with what the real benefits of using Survey Galaxy's templates are you may find the Import from Template Library tutorial of interest.

Styles

We have added a number of styles to the system styles to help you customise the look and feel of your survey. You are still able to fully customise the survey to your own requirements such as change the colours, fonts style and size; check out the Customizing Styles tutorial for more detailed information.


CC Email Responses

Many of our members are realising the benefits of using surveys as forms throughout the organisation. They are creating surveys based on existing hard copy forms and use the Edit Details option for the survey to set the 'Email Responses' to 'Yes'. The respondents answers are then emailed to the publisher as soon as the respondent completes the survey, thus making it ideal for forms such as room booking and holiday requests and all the many ad-hoc forms that spring up throughout an organisation.

We have now added an optional 'CC' facility that will provide a courtesy copy to a number of people improving the chances that a formal requests will always be received and acted upon in a quick and timely manner.

The other major benefit of using surveys as forms is that a record of requests is always maintained and can be analyzed at any time using the standard survey reporting tools. If you can look around and see a lot of paper forms why not consider setting up one or two through Survey Galaxy and see for yourself?

Export Results

We would always recommend in the first instance that you use our own online Results Analyzer to analyze and query the survey data but have nevertheless always provided the facility to allow survey results to be exported for use in applications such as Excel and SPSS.

If your knowledge of Excel is limited, and even if you are an expert to save you time, we have for a long time included with all export orders an Excel spreadsheet containing macros to help display the information as a Pivot table and also generate charts, we have now consolidated all the Excel macros that we provide into a single spreadsheet.

Please note a few things about the macros we provide:

• The Excel macros are provided 'as is' and do not form any part of the Survey Galaxy purchased services.
• The macros are documented, visible and unprotected so if you are technically minded you can always view the code and have confidence that they contain no malicious code.
• The Excel macros are only certified to run on Windows XP and Excel 2003

We are not precious about the macro code so your are able to modify and extend the functionality if required.

We have recently included a macro that will transpose the exported data that is provided in rows, into columns; a word or warning though, Excel 2003 is limited to 256 columns so not all surveys can be transposed.

New Quit Survey Button

We have introduced a new facility that will allow you to include a 'Quit' option on your survey and you may wonder why this would be of benefit to you.

The value of having the Quit button will depend entirely on the type and purpose of your survey but it does give you the opportunity to find out why people are not completing the survey.

The Quit button is introduce by specifying a URL to be called if the Quit button is used. This can point to a simple 'Thank you for your time' page, can take the respondent to your home page or it can be used to link to another survey to ask the repondent why they quit the survey thereby providing you with valuable information.

If no Quit URL is specified, then the Quit button is not displayed.

Thank you

Well that is about it for now, we would however like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who provided us with feedback and enhancement requests.

If you have a feature you would like us to consider, or find an existing facility confusing or difficult to use please let us know as it is really useful for us to know what the features are that people require and where we need to channel our development efforts.