How To Use Google Docs As A Slick Survey Tool. Add this one to the list of “cool Google features I really should have already known about.”
Google Docs, in addition to being a stellar way to write, store and manage your documents and slideshows, is also a fantastically useful way to collect survey data. Basically, you send out a form, people fill it in, and Google reports the documents back to you in an incredibly simple and easy-to-understand fashion. To get started, sign in at Google Docs. If you have a Gmail account, you have a Google Docs account. If you don’t, come out from that rock you live under, boot up the computer, and get yourself a Gmail account. Give your form a title and an explanation. Type the first question into the “Question title” field. Fill in all the available answers, choose whether or not to make it a required question (i.e. do they have to answer this one before sending in the survey?) To get a new question, click the “Add Question” button at the top left of the page.
How do you get information from people? 5 Ways to Collaborate on Documents Online in Real Time. Collaborating with others online has never been easier.
There are a number of options for everything from sharing images and video to presentations, tasks and more. Here we'll focus on collaborating on documents in real time, an area that's improved quite a bit, but still has a way to go. Of these five options, some services require you to create documents online while others allow you to create them off. There isn’t one clear cut winner in the bunch, it all depends on your situation, your needs and where you want to keep your files. Have a real time online document collaboration tool to recommend? 1. EtherPad offers real-time editing and collaboration of plain text documents. The interface is a little barebones and too many common features we’ve grown accustomed to in office suites are missing but this is a good solution for basic brainstorming sessions for groups of people in real time.
Here’s a video demo of Etherpad in action. 2. 3. 4. 5. More online tools from Mashable: DocStoc Does Its Part To Rid The Web Of Download Links. Document sharing site DocStoc has launched DocShots, a free service that allows publishers to convert any document on a website into a hoverable link that provides an instant online document preview.
DocShots’ technology cuts long downloading times while also giving readers an easy way to preview documents in a pop-up window. DocShots allows website and blog owners to easily add a custom DocShots code (by literally just copying and pasting) into the html code of the site, rendering any posted documents (Word, Powerpoint, PDF, and Excel) as DocShots links. The publisher can even specify the exact size of the pop-up window. When users scroll over the links, they can instantly preview files in the pop-up viewer.
DocShots is similar in theory to Snap‘s Snap Shots application (whose technology we feature on TechCrunch), where a user can hover over a link to a site and see a small visual preview of what is on the site. Issuu revealed a similar application late last year.