Building Surveys

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A SharePoint survey is a useful tool to poll your community. There is a Survey item that is easy to initiate. The success of any survey depends on the participation of your community and providing the right questions.

In SharePoint, a survey is a list. When a survey response is completed, the responder is directed to the contents of the list. A site owner might want to keep the items hidden from the people polled. If the results are hidden, the owner might want to provide a note that thanks the participant. Ultimately, the owner wants to direct the participants to the homepage or another location.

This article will guide you on how to set up a simple (no question forks) survey, build an acknowledgement message (Thank You page), and redirect the participants (to the APAN SharePoint User Group). You can tailor your message and redirect to suit your needs.

Create a Survey - Quick

This section lists the steps to build a survey and a Thank You page that redirects the participant to the APAN SharePoint User Group. Details are listed in the next section.

  1. Click on Site Action à More Options…
  2. Choose Survey from the items.
  3. Provide a name for your Survey. Click on More Options
  4. Set the Navigation and Survey Options. Click on Create.
  5. Enter an explanation of your survey in your first question as Multiple Line of Text. Click on Next Question
  6. Enter question and type. Click on Next Question
  7. Repeat step 7 for all questions. On your last question click on Finish.
  8. Create a message page with a link to the redirect page and save it.
  9. Copy message page link to a Notepad.
  10. Construct the link to the survey with the Notepad.
  11. Place the link on your homepage or use the left navigation.

Create a Survey – Detailed

  1. Click on Site Actions
  2. Click More Options
  3. Click on List in the Filter By section.
  4. Then click on Survey icon. Provide a name for your survey
  5. Cclick the More Options button
  6. On the Create page, under Navigation click the No radio button so that the survey is not displayed in the left navigation. Leave the Survey Options as shown.
  7. Click on the Create button
  8. Enter Instructions for your survey in the Question box.
  9. Select the radio button next to Multiple lines of text.
  10. Click Next Question.
  11. Add your first question. For this example, we will use “The website navigation is easy to use.”
  12. Click Choice (menu to choose from).
  13. Under Additional Question Settings, click the radio button Yes to Require a response to this question.
  14. Delete the default responses and type in 3 choices: Agree, Disagree, and No Opinion.
  15. Click Finish.  In real life, you would add more questions and perhaps a variety of choices and text responses.
  16. On the General Settings page, copy the URL of your list, as shown below to a Notepad. Replace “overview.aspx” with “NewForm.aspx”. Please note that there are no spaces between New and Form.
  17. Build a Thank You page. Click Site Actions > New Page.
  18. Add a useful page name such as ThxWebSurvey. Do not use spaces.
  19. Click the Create button.
  20. Edit the ThxWebSurvey page by adding a message, and an optional picture.
  21. Add a link that redirects the user back to your site.
  22. Click the Check In icon in the ribbon.
  23. Add comment, if desired.
  24. Click Continue button.
  25. Construct the link that goes to the Survey and redirects users to the Thank You page by first getting the URL of the ThxWebSurvey page that we just created.
  26. Copy the URL. Return to the Notepad that you used in Step 7. At the end of the URL add “?Source=” without the quotes.
  27. Then paste the URL of your ThxWebSurvey page. So that your URL looks like: https://wss.apan.org/s/PTS/Lists/Group%20Survey/NewForm.aspx?source=https://wss.apan.org/s/PTS/Pages/Test1.aspx
  28. Add this link to your Homepage, using a Content Editor Web Part. Use a Simple request such as “Respond to our Survey”.
  29. Add a link to the text in the same way that you added the redirect in your Thank You page.
  30. Save your home page.