Last week, I decided to try the new survey feature of Google Docs. It has some slick features, particularly in that it compiles the results to a spreadsheet automatically, but it also has a few, er, idiosyncrasies.

Open in a New Tab?
The most irritating thing, which is surely a bug, is this. You click on the spreadsheet from the docs list. It opens in another tab. Then from that tab, you go to another page. Perhaps you start to compose a blog post. Then you switch back over to the docs list and click the spreadsheet again to open it. It opens in the tab where it was previous open, rather than a new tab. Perhaps this is the tab that contains your newly composed blog post. Or did contain before that content was replaced with the spreadsheet, wiping out all of your writing. Ahem.

Anonymous Results
Another thing that I suppose makes senses but isn’t clear up front is that you can send the survey to a list of email addresses, but the survey results are anonymous. So my question asking if the respondent is willing to do a follow up survey? Not all that useful to me. I’ve since added a new field asking for that email address.

Limited Question Types
Two things I really needed in my survey but that Google Docs didn’t have were:

• An ordered list (rank a list in order of importance)
• An “other” choice with a text field (so respondents could write in additional answers)

No Custom Email Messages
You can send the form out via email, but any text you write ends up as part of the form. You can’t send a separate email message as you can with other types of Google docs.

Overall all though, the survey was easy to put together and it’s easy to see the responses. I can’t seem to manipulate things much in Google Docs, so I’ll likely have to export to Excel. It would be nice, for instance, if my single-choice answers had graphs or pie charts displayed by default that showed distribution. Instead, I just have a non-compiled laundry list of answers. You can now add Gadgets to spreadsheets, and likely one of these does what I want, but I’d like to have some of that functionality built in. Not that I’m saying I’m lazy.

If you’d like to take my survey about how you approach and measure your online marketing activities, you can check it out here. All results are anonymous. Unless you fill out the newly added email question. Which, like the rest of the survey questions, is entirely optional.