Creating a quick survey

Seth Crothers December 04, 2001

This tip shows how Domino can help you very quickly field a simple, short survey by creating a
database and questionnaire form, and using Actions - Forward in Designer to push the form out
to its recipients in mail.

Creating a Notes/Domino database for a survey or questionnaire is an effective and frequently

used approach. It's especially useful when you have a complex survey and/or a large number of
respondents because you can use the database's features (documents, views, agents, and so on)
to collect and analyze the responses.

But sometimes, you just want to send out a short survey quickly. Notes/Domino can help you with
this as well. To create a short, e-mail survey:

1. In Domino Designer, create a test database using any standard template.

2. Create a new form in the database.
3. In this form, create a new field for each of your survey questions. For each field, select either
Checkbox or Radio button as the field Type in the Field properties box. Make sure they are
Editable.
4. On the Control tab of the Field properties box, list the choices that should appear as
checkboxes or radio buttons for each question.
5. Add text to the form around the fields to pose questions or provide directions for filling out the
survey.
Figure 1. Survey questions in Designer

6. Save the form.

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You are now ready to send your survey out.

1. With the form open in Designer, choose Design - Preview in Notes.

2. In Notes, choose Actions - Forward. This places the form in a new Memo document.
3. Fill in the To, cc, bcc, and Subject fields. You can add directions in the message of the e-mail.
For example, you might want to remind respondents to choose Reply with History to return
the survey.
Figure 2. Forwarding the survey

Since the reply is editable, respondents can add text answers to the survey as well. To make their
text stand out, you can indent the line just below the survey question and change the text color so
that when users type their answers there, it will appear in a different color.

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