Excel? Or something else? Forms and a database

[madcows]

Hi there,
I really hope someone can help me, as I don't know where to start with this.
I'm involved in a small charity. I want to find a way for people to fill in an electronic form, email it to me, and then I somehow download it, or import it, into excel (or something similar).
Anyone any idea how to do this, or where to start????
tahnks,
madcows

There are lots of free web based survey sites. You write the survey, send a link to your survey base via email and then (I think) you can collate the results in Excel and such.

I would search the 'net for 'free survey' and see what comes up, for example.

If you get porn? Its not my fault!!

I am for my sins a database programmer. If you send me a personal message through MN I might be able to send you something that fits the bill. I'm quite busy but always keen to do Good Work for nothing if it doesn't take too long.

But if you want it to end up in Excel, forget it- I spend a huge amount of time dealing with people who though it was a good idea to collate data in Excel and then finding out that it really isn't!

Wow - isn't MN great! What we're doing is actually applications rather than a survey, so I don't think the web-based survey sites would work.

Prism, thanks for the warning re excel. What would be better? (I once went on a training for Access, but never used it - perhaps that would be better?) Let me know and then perhaps I can send you a message thro' MN (if I can work out how)... They are applications for grants - so far we've never rec'd more than about 30 per year, but expecting applications to increase, and don't want to be doing it all manually!
Many thanks,
madcows

Access is definitely better than Excel, but that's really because Excel isn't a database at all, and is fine for doing things with numbers but once you get into any kind of categorising of data it's really not appropriate.

Ask 5 programmers what the best way to do anything is and you will get at least 10 different opinions - I couldn't say what the best thing for you is without knowing much more about what exactly you're trying to do- a web- based thing might be very good, or a runtime file that you send out and gets sent back; there are all sorts of ways of doing it but it depends on what you want to do now, what you are likely to want to do in the future, and how much you are likely to want to tweak it yourself.

So PM me, or whatever they say on here, and I'll drone on at further length.

"I couldn't say what the best thing for you is without knowing much more about what exactly you're trying to do- a web- based thing might be very good, or a runtime file that you send out and gets sent back"

I'll just chip in that I'd probably go the web based approach.

Sending out a runtime file is just asking for trouble. You've got the security concerns where it is against many company IT policies to accept and execute un-checked applications and then there's the whole compatibility problem of the app only running on certain machines.

If the web page can output or email the results of the form in a CSV format (and any decent web thing should be able to do that) then you're going to have something that pretty much anyone on any machine can access and will give you the data in a format that most applications (Excel, Access or whatever) should be able to process.

I wonder if Google Docs Forms would be sufficient for your needs.

www.labnol.org/software/google-docs-forms-for-surveys/10056/

Google Forms supports Multiple Page forms... including a GoTo function, so based on an answer it can GoTo another page.
See docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=141062

Google Forms can e-mail you when someone completes the form and will collate the data in a Google Spreadsheet - so you can then import that into other software if you needed.

Google Forms is within Google Docs: docs.google.com