How can I create short daily surveys that populate into excel?

April 28, 2013 9:43 AM

I have digestion issues and are interested in tracking my digestion with a few short questions every day so I can see if there are obvious trends, palliative measures that consistently work, or ingredients to avoid. I'd like to have a short survey with radio buttons that covers the basics that I can do on my phone and populates into an excel spreadsheet (or whatever) that I can track over time. This seems like it shouldn't be too difficult, but I haven't been able to find an app that offers this. I'm willing to pay for the app.

I'm bad at remembering to do this on paper (lose the paper, forget to write it down) but if I had a survey app on my phone that I could record it on, that would be super.

I don't want to have to pull up google docs on my smartphone to be able to do this, it is too cumbersome to load on my tiny screen unless there is some awesome survey function of google docs that would display in a smartphone-type setting.

Thanks!

posted by stewiethegreat to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Do you know about Google Forms? They create web-based surveys just like you described, and the data goes into a spreadsheet. Once set up, I find them easy to fill in on a smartphone.
posted by teremala at 9:46 AM on April 28, 2013 [5 favorites]

I don't know about mobile compatibility, but it's extremely easy to make a survey like this in Google Drive. It would populate to a Google Drive spreadsheet, but they're basically interchangeable with excel and can be exported as an .xls.

I've used this in the past to email out lunch orders to coworkers working offsite. The email links to the survey. My guess is that people working on smartphones are able to answer the survey, but I haven't tried it myself and there were enough annoying luddites who didn't get it that I have my doubts about how seamless it is.

But this would definitely be what I would use if I wanted to do what you're trying to do.
posted by Sara C. at 9:48 AM on April 28, 2013

I'm pretty sure "Google Forms" is the same thing I'm talking about.
posted by Sara C. at 9:49 AM on April 28, 2013

Surveymonkey results pull directly into excel. It is a simple job to set up an online survey.
posted by MuffinMan at 9:52 AM on April 28, 2013