Offline Browser-Based Survey

your assuming though the person has excel on their machine ... I'm not 100% but I think PHP/MySQL/Apache can be run off a CD

CVS (forgot the initals) comma seperated something (it's late and has been really long day).

The results would be like:
yes,no,yes,no, yes, yes, no, no ...
and each line would be a seperate section (after line break)
this format would be able to be imported into a mysql database or similar as well. As to how you'd get the results is another matter though.

Welcome to TWF

Thanks for the reply - excel will be available as the company who will use this survey require all manager's to have office. I'll take a look for CVS and see what comes up. Thanks for pointing me in some sort of direction.

If they all have office, would it not be easier (read more practical and thus cheaper) to set up an Access database with forms?

Or you could just send around the Excel spreadsheet by itself. How're you going to get the details back if you're using a CD?

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Bless Busy, it must have been a long day, let me just clarify what Busy means:
CVS - Concurrent Versioning System, nothing to do with what you need.
CSV - Comma Seperated Values. Errr, Values, ummmm, seperated by commas. Funnily enough! CSV can be opened by a multitude of programs as it's a very simple file format. You could write this using Javascript.

The survey is for self-assessment it is not being lodged anywhere. It is a company who's managers have to ensure they are following brand standards the final report goes nowhere BUT in saying that - it may in the future - so good point JeevesBond. I'm not well versed in Office products other than Excel and Word to be honest - I'm not sure Access if going to give that wow! factor. Ideally it needs to be an interactive brochure where each sction has nice pretty graphics and points about the brand standard section and then - popup! here is the survey q's for this particular section - thats why I was thinking along the lines of web site with forms - the end result needs to show the manager 'hey you scored xxx points out of a possible yyy - you need to improve' - thats where the excel part came into - also a graph showing each section's conformaties would be good e.g. Reception Conforms 90% but back of house conforms 40% and functions conform 75% and so on - so visually it shows what areas are lacking and which ones are excelling.

Ideally I'd love to be able to let FrontPage do this but of course I have the issue of FPEs - although I loathe FP - it would actually allow me to pump these responses straight into a file which could be put into a spreadsheet - or so I remember it being able to do. Once this spreadhsheet had it's figures I was planning on have other sheets which took this information (i.e. sheet 2 had formulas built into it to take answers from sheet1) and converted it into readable and logical info.

However, maybe I am overcomplicating it all and need to use a form making program

If you have interns, you could give them something to do. Fill it out on paper and have the little guys go pick 'em up. Stand over the desk until it's done.

But that's a little low tech. And not as much fun.

Personally, I would make it flash based and at the end of it generate tab delimited data using actionscript... I'm assuming that since this is the 21st century all the computers will have net/email access? If so, using a standard mailto link you can put the data into an email which can then go to whoever is collating the results.

In case you wondered why I say tab delimited data, it's because you can copy and paste it straight into excel and it will put each bit of data into a new cell.

Thanks for all your great advice. I've conered myelf slightly with this one. Committed price and timeframe but didn't understand the job spec fully...that'll teach me. I generally use contractors to do Flash work as I don't know and don't want to/no time to learn it. So to pay a contracotr to do this project would cost me more than the $750AUD quoted. Thus I have to suffer and do in HTML/PHP. I believe it is relatively easy to get the data into a plain txt file and I've done that - then I have managed to make some sense of that information by using another excel sheet to count the yes and no answers (I have setup only 3 questions at this stage for testing purposes). My main issue now is getting the PHP script which opens up and writes to the txt file to run on a PC but without the user having to 'install' anything - we have to assume the user is stupid (software wise) and is unable to install software - all they want to do is transfer the files from CD to the PC and open the index page.

So I know that scripts can be run offline using various software - but does anyone know PHP compilers that don't require an install - say one that can run just by being in the same dir as the htm/php files???

failing this I think I'll handball it or tell them that for their $$ it will need to be an online thing.

Thanks

I'm thinking you could use JavaScript to generate an XLS file with the results. Not sure about the specifics of the format, but I know people have done it before.