Tips, tricks, tools, and techniques for Microsoft Office

Before asking readers for their feedback about The Office Letter in our semi-annual reader survey, I went searching for a full-featured survey program that supported collecting data via the Web. I was happy with our current program, but, frankly, wanted something that made more attractive Web pages and provided more options (requiring questions be answered, for example).

As the author of a DOS survey-processing program (Survey Analyst, back in the late 80's), I know what's involved with building and analyzing surveys. After throwing up my hands at several other programs recently, I took a look at Remark Web Survey 3.0 from Principia Products. There are two versions. Standard is $499; Professional, which we tested, is $950.

There was some initial rough going due to inadequate installation instructions -- the user guide failed to explain that security settings of several files had to be changed on the Web server. Principia says it is preparing a revised installation quick guide. Once that setup problem was solved, I found the program's interface to the Web was delightfully transparent.

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Using Remark's Designer component, you can quickly set up a multi-page questionnaire. You can pick from questions with multiple choice, check-all-that-apply, or fill-in-the-blanks answers (among other formats). You can insert horizontal lines, labels (just text, really), and graphics (the Office Letter logo, for example), and immediately see how the survey will look as you build it.

You can mark a question as required, use your own list of responses (Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, etc.) or pick from among several built-in options, and control formatting (colors, blank lines, text and button alignment). Remark Web Survey can list a question's possible answers in one or more evenly-spaced columns or in a pull-down list, which is especially useful when a question has many possible answers. You pick the desired look, and Remark Web Survey does all the hard work.

You can password protect your survey (you can import a list of existing passwords, too), display progress indicators at the bottom of each Web page (for multi-page surveys), and even link a question to an existing database (Access, Excel, dBASE, FoxPro, and Paradox are supported, as are connections via ODBC).

The Professional version adds several important features for more sophisticated surveys. With it, your survey can branch based on a response (if a user answers "Yes" to question 2, you can skip to question 4, for example). You can add confirmation pages, which provide respondents a list of all their answers to the questions so they can make changes if desired. To prevent user fatigue from stopping a respondent from answering the complete survey, you can set a pause point. Those taking your survey can stop at one of these spots and their responses will be saved so they can complete the survey later.

Once your survey is complete, uploading it to your Web server is surprisingly easy. Also easy are the methods for getting your respondents' answers out of the system: it's a simple matter to download the results (all responses or just those since the last download), view them in a table, export them (to Excel, SPSS, ASCII, or Access, among other formats), or generate (and print) quick reports (question, responses, and percents, plus a chart for each question).

You can also use the program to generate forms that can be e-mailed (though it doesn't perform the mailing -- it just prepares the forms). If you've created a form with a login page, you can see who has and has not completed the survey.

The program still has room for improvement. When you double-click on a question to change its properties, there's a noticeable lag until the requisite dialog box appears. Another annoyance: while the program supports styles, if you use Rich Text mode for question text (the only way to display italic text), the style isn't applied.

Other limitations are more annoying. For example, several Windows conventions aren't observed. You can't select and right-click on a question and use a "Copy" option -- the process of copying a question is more time consuming. You also can't keep two surveys opened at once. There was no way to flip back and forth between the Premium Edition survey and the Standard Edition survey, so making a correction to a question in both surveys was laborious.

The program has a wizard for quick creation of a survey, but I found it more confusing than helpful initially. You really must invest time in learning the program before you get the hang of it and have it working the way you want. For example, after launching the survey I wanted to change the way in which results for a question were reported. No such luck. I would have had to start over, losing responses already entered. Plan to spend several hours with Remark Web Survey to make sure you've chosen the correct options and that everything's working to your satisfaction before you publish a survey.

Despite these annoyances, I can say Remark Web Survey does a good job overall of building attractive surveys, makes them easy to deploy, and requires only a few steps to analyze the results.

For more information, visit http://www.principiaproducts.com.

-- James E. Powell

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