How to Create a Survey in SharePoint Online? A Structured Guide

Let’s walk through one of the widely searched queries “How to Create a Survey in SharePoint Online”. In this guide, we will explore the steps involved in creating surveys in SharePoint Online. We will also discuss how to design, distribute, and analyze the results of the surveys.

Apart from managing large lists and libraries in SharePoint Online, SharePoint also provides an option to create surveys. This feature helps to gather the Team’s or stakeholders’ feedback, which is later analyzed to make informed decisions for the future growth of organizations.

So, let’s just deep dive into the process.

Choose Survey Type

Before creating the survey, you should know the type of survey that you want to create. Here is a list of some types of surveys that help to determine which survey form will be best to meet your specific requirements.

1. Traditional Survey: A survey that has MCQs, a rating scale, or other question types.
2. Quick Poll: Incorporating a quick poll for easy feedback.
3. Quiz or Test: Create a quiz or simple test to assess the knowledge of team members.
4. Custom Survey: Set up the custom questions and advanced features.

Quick Tips to Design Your Survey Questionnaire

Follow the below practices to design your survey questions.

• Clear and Concise: Prepare the question in a simple manner that can be understood by users easily.
• Use Appropriate Question Types: Pick up the most suitable type of question(e.g., MCQ, rating scale, open-ended).
• Logical Order: Arrange your survey questions logically in a proper flow.
• Keep it Short: Do not increase the length of the survey, if not required. Try to keep it short to gather all the necessary information.

How to Create a Survey in SharePoint Online?

Follow the below steps for creating a survey in SharePoint Online seamlessly.

1. Move to the SharePoint site where you want to create your survey.

2. Click Settings and choose ‘Add an App.’

3. On the ‘Your Apps’ page, search for a survey in the search field and then hit the survey icon.

4. Provide a name to your survey and hit the Create button.

5. From the Site content page, open the Survey.

6. Complete an overview of the purpose or content of the survey in the description field to inform users of the questions they are being asked to answer (this is an optional field).

7. Choose the appropriate options, stating whether you’d like your survey results to show respondent names and whether you wish to allow multiple responses.

8. Now open Settings and choose the Add Questions option.

9. Provide the Question and choose the type of answer for that.

10. If a question is mandatory, you can select this option in the ‘Additional Question’ settings. You can also specify maximum character limits where applicable.

After completion of the details, Finish the survey. You can also edit it again if required.

Branching in Surveys

To ask the questions based on the responses is called branching in SharePoint. You can enable it with the below steps.

1. Launch the Survey.
2. Choose Survey Settings.
3. Open the Questions and select the question to add branching logic.
4. From the branching logic section, choose the question to branch to for each possible response and then OK.

How to Grant Permissions to Access the Survey in SharePoint?

When you create a survey in SharePoint, then it inherits the permission of its parent site by default. So, to grant permission to the users so that they can respond to it, you need to break the parent inheritance and then assign the needy permission to the users. To do so

1. Launch the survey from the Site Content.
2. Open Settings and choose the Survey Settings
3. Click Permissions for this survey and then Grant permissions.
4. Enable invite People and provide their email addresses. Finally, apply the permissions as per requirement.

SharePoint Survey Distribution Methods

After creating a survey list in SharePoint, it’s time to distribute it to others.

• You can send the survey link via email to the users.
• If you want that all SharePoint users can access it easily, you can also embed it into the home page of SharePoint.

How to Analyze Survey Responses?

• Step 1. Open the Survey and hit the show a graphical summary of responses.
• Step 2. You can also hit the option “show all responses”.
• Step 3. To export them, choose the option Export to spreadsheet. Hit OK in the opened dialog box.

Best Practices for Creating and Taking Responses Using SharePoint Online Surveys

Below are the considerations that you can follow to create a survey in SharePoint Online which is efficient and reliable for the users.

• Test Your Survey: Test the survey on a small group of members to identify the areas of improvement.
• Incentivize Participation: Offers additional benefits to the respondents.
• Thank Respondents: Sending thank messages to the respondents.
• Maintain Confidentiality: Maintain the respondent’s privacy and confidentiality.

How to Migrate SharePoint Survey to Another SharePoint Site?

There might be the possibility that you need to share the survey response to another SharePoint site. In that situation, you can use the Most Efficient SharePoint Migration Tool. This tool can move  items from one SharePoint list to another without any data loss.

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Below are the quick steps of this tool.

• Step 1. Download and Run the tool.
• Step 2. Select O365 as the Source and Destination.
• Step 3. Enable the Sites option from the workload section.
• Step 4. Provide the Source and Destination credentials of the O365 account.
• Step 5. Add Users and then Start Migration.

Conclusion

Because how to create a survey in SharePoint Online becomes the top query of SharePoint admins or other users. Therefore, in this structured write-up, we have discussed all the steps to create, manage, and analyze the surveys in SharePoint Online. Now, you can easily create survey forms in SharePoint Online and then analyze the feedback.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is it possible to create branched surveys in SharePoint Online?
A: Yes, SharePoint Online offers the option to apply the branching in surveys. Due to this, you can ask the questions based on their previous answers.

Q: What types of questions are supported in the SharePoint Online surveys?
A: You can add a variety of questions in your survey to make it more interactive to users. You can use MCQs, ratings, and open-ended, questionnaires in the SharePoint survey.

Q: How do I analyze survey responses in SharePoint Online?
A: You can export survey responses in Excel or analyze them through graphs.

Q: Can I integrate my SharePoint Online survey with other Office 365 tools?
A: Yes, creating a survey in SharePoint Online with the other Microsoft 365 suite apps such as Microsoft Forms and Power BI.