Skip to main content

How to make a Google Docs survey

Ready to make a survey? Google Drive makes it easy – and free – with the right tools. If you are familiar with Google Docs, you’ll have no problem quickly customizing a survey and getting it sent out to collect results fast. Here’s the best way to build one.

Related Videos

Difficulty

Easy

Duration

1 hour

What You Need

  • Online access to Google Drive

How to make a survey on Google Docs

Step 1: Navigate to Google Forms. Forms is where Google Drive keeps many of its interactive tools, allowing you to build a variety of forms for the topic – including surveys. Like Docs, it’s free if you have a Google account. You can start by visiting this webpage and selecting Go to forms.

Google Forms Login.

Step 2: Select the Blank option with the plus sign to start a new Form.

Choose a new Form.

Step 3: Name your Form, and describe what kind of survey it is. Make your description useful for those who will be seeing your Form, so describe why you are surveying them, what kind of answers you would like them to give, and more.

Name Your Survey.

Step 4: At this point, we suggest going over to the Settings section at the top of the Form. Since this is a survey, you won’t need to worry about making it a quiz. However, you should check the Responses section to see if the settings are correct. You can choose to collect email addresses from responders or not, allow people to edit their responses, and more.

Then visit the Presentation section, where you can make choices like shuffling questions for each respondent, showing a progress bar for survey questions (a good idea), sending a confirmation message, and more. Tailor this to the purpose of your survey and how you want it to work.

The Defaults section at the bottom will allow you to permanently change some settings if you plan on making a lot of surveys over time.

Google Form Settings.

Step 5: Now, we suggest visiting the Palette board icon in the upper-right corner to customize the theme. Here, you can add a header image, choose colors, and change the font. Customize your survey to look exactly how you want. If you aren’t sure where to start, Google does have a bunch of themes to pick from, such as Event Feedback or Course Evaluation, which can make things very easy for you.

Google Form Themes.

Step 6: All right, you are ready to start making survey questions! Ideally, you’ll have the questions already pre-made in Docs, so you can just quickly copy and paste them over. But make sure you check the dropdown menu on the right for your question, where you can change the type of answer that people can give, from multiple choice to uploading a file. For a survey, you may want to use the Short answer and Paragraph options for some open-ended questions.

Google Forms Creating Question.

Step 7: Continue building your questions until the survey is completed. You have the ability to easily delete questions, make them required, and use other useful tools. When you are ready, click the Arrow icon in the upper right to send the survey to the people you have in mind. Sending it directly by email is the easiest way, but you can also create a link for it that you can share on other platforms or get HTML code for it. When ready, select Send, and your survey will be on its way.

Send Google Form.

Alternative: Use Google Surveys

You also have the option to use Google Surveys, which you can find here. It’s a more complex tool that’s better suited for larger surveys where you’ll really want to take a look at the statistical variance of responses. It may be a better choice if you are working on a marketing survey for a broad customer base, an employee survey for an organization with thousands of workers, and similar instances.

Editors' Recommendations

Google’s new Bard AI may be powerful enough to make ChatGPT worry — and it’s already here
A man walks past the logo of the US multinational technology company Google during the VivaTech trade fair.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, but it will soon have a formidable rival. Google has just announced that its new "experimental conversational AI service" called Bard has now entered the testing phase.

For Google, perfecting this AI model seems to be an absolute priority, and it's running out of time to do so. Luckily for Bard, it will have a certain edge over this version of ChatGPT.

Read more
Microsoft Word vs. Google Docs
A person using a laptop that displays various Microsoft Office apps.

For the last few decades, Microsoft Word has been the de facto standard for word processors across the working world. That's finally starting to shift, and it looks like one of Google's productivity apps is the heir apparent. The company's Google Docs solution (or to be specific, the integrated word processor) is cross-platform and interoperable, automatically syncs, is easily shareable, and perhaps best of all, is free.

However, Google Docs still has a long way to go before it can match all of Word's features -- Microsoft has been developing its word processor for over 30 years, after all. Will Google Docs' low barrier to entry and cross-platform functionality win out? Let's break down each word processor in terms of features and capabilities to help you determine which is best for your needs.
How does each word processing program compare?
To put it lightly, Microsoft Word has an incredible advantage over Google Docs in terms of raw technical capability. From relatively humble beginnings in the 1980s, Microsoft has added new tools and options in each successive version. Most of the essential editing tools are available in Google Docs, but users who are used to Word will find it limited.

Read more
How ChatGPT could help Microsoft dethrone Google Search
A person on the Google home page while using a MacBook Pro laptop on a desk.

Microsoft is attempting to dethrone Google as the search champion by integrating ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. That’s according to a new report from The Information -- but will the gamble pay off?

ChatGPT only launched in November 2022, but it’s already been making waves among artificial intelligence researchers and the general public alike due to the unerring realism of its output. Chuck in any prompt you can think of and you’ll get back something that keenly resembles human-generated text, and people have been using it to write articles, generate code, and compose musical scores.

Read more