How to create a SharePoint Survey in under 5 minutes

This post will discuss how to create a Survey in SharePoint using out of the box functionality and nothing else! The example we will use is to create a survey that asks employees to answer questions about their previous training in the organization.

Step 1: Ensure the 'Team Collaboration Lists' Features is activated.

As an administrator, navigate to 'Site Settings' -> 'Manage site features' (in the 'Site Actions' section). Scroll down the list and ensure that the 'Team Collaboration Lists' feature says 'Active'. If it doesn't click 'Activate'. If you aren't an administrator, you need to find one to get them to activate this feature. (It is usually activated on collaboration / team sites).

Step 2 : Add the Survey App to your site.

From the 'Settings' cog, select 'Add an app'.

Use the search option to find the 'Survey' app and click to select it.

Give your survey a name and click 'Create'.

This will create the survey type in your site.

Step 3 : Add questions to your survey

It's time to add some questions about the employees training needs, so let's ask away! You can obviously select your own questions and choose the relevant answer type (e.g yes/no, text, number, radio list, etc). My questions were :

• Have you been trained in SharePoint?
• Have you received Agile training?
• Do you know how to raise a Change Request?
• Do you know how to fill in a risk assessment form?

To add questions, use the ellipsis (three dots) to the right of the survey option you just created and select settings.

From the 'Questions' section towards the bottom of the Settings page, select 'Add a question'.

Enter your question, select the question type, and consider the appropriate response to all of the additional question settings provided. You can return and amend these at a later stage, so when you're happy, repeat the process using the 'Next Question' option or 'Finish' when you've added all of your questions.

To amend any question, simply click on it in the question list, you can also add further questions or change the order using the options provided.

Step 4 : Enhance your survey

As this stage you may be totally happy with the survey and it's ready to go! However, there may be a few additional things you want to do from here.

Adding question branching

You may want to enhance your survey with additional questions or the provision of information, based on an answer provided by the user.  Branching enables you to do some simple conditional testing of an answer. To set-up branching select the question you want to branch from and from the 'Branching Logic' section use the dropdown list against the relevant answer to select the question you want to jump to if the user selects that option. 

For example, if a user selects 'Yes, but I'd like to know more' as an answer to a question, you can add branching logic to help them follow the appropriate next steps.

Advanced Settings

One final groups of settings that you may want to make is around who can edit and view the answers when they are input. This can be quite important if you do not want a user who has responded to be able to see all the other users' answers. You may also want to turn of search crawling if you don't want the answers to appear in search results.

Look for the 'Advanced settings'  option in the site settings page to amend these.

You will then be able to amend these settings and view the other options available to you.

That's it! All you need to do now is ask your users to fill in the survey and voila!

How to use SharePoint Surveys to ensure users fully understand the content of your essential documents stored in SharePoint

Our DocSurvey and DocRead add-ons for SharePoint enhance what you can do with the out-of-the-box Surveys and allow you to attach them to any content in SharePoint to ensure your users fully understand it.

DocRead and DocSurvey can transform your SharePoint Surveys by offering this extra functionality:

• Create Quizzes - with pass marks and scores.
• E-Learning - create questions that are information only, ideal for creating an E-Learning Module.
• Add the ability to embed video, images and html questions.
• Tight Integration with DocRead, so you can send a quiz/survey to any group of users and request that they complete it within a certain period of time.
• Reports - analyse which questions people are struggling on.
• Assign a Quiz to a document to ensure people fully understand its contents.
• and many more features.

Read more about how DocRead and DocSurvey can help you ensuring your content is read and fully understood.

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SharePoint Survey Permissions Explained

SharePoint Permissions can be complex at the best of times. After all, we have constructs like inheritance, group / user permissions, permission levels and so on. This post will attempt to tackle some of the security questions that you may have asked when dealing specifically with SharePoint Survey security and permissions.

We will go through each of the categories and analyze what SharePoint Survey permissions relate to in terms of functionality.

In this example survey, we have taken the default settings but have changed the Survey Settings > Advanced Settings > Read access option to Read responses that were created by the user from default Read all responses.

In a standard Team Site these Groups are generally created. We will review each group in turn, and see what a user can and cannot achieve when using a SharePoint Survey.

Here is a list of the different SharePoint users and permissions.

Everyone

This special group refers to anyone who is logged onto SharePoint. If you didn't have Everyone, you'd need to add a every user in AD to a SharePoint Group.

However if 'Everyone' isn’t part of a group then they won’t be able to see the survey or any SharePoint site. (However, if anonymous access has been enabled then non logged in users may be able to navigate to the survey).

If you want to use the 'Everyone' group then you can add it to a group with the relevant permissions. For example, by adding "Everyone" to the Team Site Members group then any logged on user will inherit those permissions.

Excel Services Viewer

An Excel Services Viewer can access the site as a Visitor so they aren't able to respond to the survey.  They are unable to view any results in the interface by clicking 'Show all responses' or 'Show a graphical summary of responses'.

Team Site Members

As a member of this group, a user can respond to the survey through the interface. However, they will only be able to see their own responses. (As we changed the default). To allow any user who has responded to see everyone's results then navigate to Survey Settings > Advanced Settings > Read access and change the option to "Read all responses".

In addition to being able to respond, a member of this group can configure the survey settings and can also add questions. (This is because the group is given the "Contribute" Permission Level by default.)

However, under the "Advanced settings" they are not able to change the Item-Level Permissions compared. This is because the "Contribute" permission doesn't have the "Manage Permissions" permission.

In addition Validation settings, Permissions for this Survey are not available for a member. Wheras a Site Owner has these permissions. (The reason that they are missing is because SharePoint "Security Trims" items that a user cannot access).

Notice how "Permissions for this survey" and "Validation Settings" are missing below.

Team site Moderators

Moderators can respond to the survey, see all the responses and also access the settings of the survey.

The Moderator is also able to alter the Item-level permission in Advanced settings something which a Member can't.

Team Site Owners

Owners can create, edit and delete all aspects of the survey and have full control over it. They are able to change the Item-Level Permission in advanced settings like a Moderator.

Team site Visitors

Visitors cannot respond to the survey and also they can’t see the number of responses. While they are able to see the links to show all responses and also graphical summary, nothing is displayed.

Advanced Settings

It is useful to set the 'Read access' and the 'Create and Edit access' prior to distributing the link.

By default it is set to Read all responses and Create responses and edit responses that were created by the user.

You may wish to consider changing read access to ones which were only created by the user.

As a final note, if a SharePoint user doesn't have the relevant permissions to respond to the survey, they will receive an "Access Denied" message.

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How to find out who has completed a SharePoint Survey

If you would like to find out who has completed a survey you created with either SharePoint Survey or by using DocSurvey for SharePoint, then hopefully the instructions below will help you:

Firstly, ensure you check the box as shown below when you create the survey.

Leaving this box unchecked means that users can complete the survey anonymously and user names will not be recorded.

Once your survey is complete and users have submitted responses then you can review the survey results:

This will display a list of responses by user as shown below. If you are using DocSurvey then the 'Response Score' field indicates whether they passed or failed the test or quiz.

If you click on one of the responses you will be able to see more detail. (This is only available when using DocSurvey)

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If you have created a survey, quiz or questionnaire using DocSurvey for SharePoint and want to link it to a specific document then you can easily achieve this by following these simple steps.

Different versions of SharePoint have different requirements, so scroll down the page to find the ones you need.

In SharePoint 2019 Modern View

1) First go to the SharePoint document library that contains the document you want to use.

2) Select the document and then click the ellipsis to show the available options.

3) Select "DocSurvey settings" from this list.

4) Use the 'drop down menu' to select the survey you want to attach. Also add a message that you want the user to see before they take the survey.

4) Click OK to finish, you should see a successful message at the top of your screen.

In SharePoint 2016 and 2019 Classic view

1) First go to the SharePoint document library and select the document you want to use.

2) Select the Files option from the top ribbon.

3) Then click 'Survey Settings' from the icon bar.

4) Use the 'drop down menu' to select the survey you want to attach. Also add a message that you want the user to see before they take the survey.

5) Click OK to finish, you should see a successful message at the top of your screen.

In SharePoint 2013

1) First go to the SharePoint document library that contains the document you want to use.

2) Select the document and then click 'Survey Settings' from the icon bar.

3) Use the 'down arrow' to select the survey that you want to attach to the document and add a message that you want the user to see before they take the survey.

If you have installed DocSurvey as part of an evaluation trial and no longer want to use the functionality, please follow these instructions to remove the feature.

On each site where you have previously activated the DocSurvey features go to 'Site Settings' and from the DocSurvey menu select 'Uninstall'.

Return to the 'Site Settings' menu and under the 'Site Actions' menu select 'Manage Site Features' and ensure that both DocSurvey items, 'DocSurvey Form Request Web Features' and 'DocSurvey Site Features' have been deactivated (select 'Deactivate' if not).

Note the warning messages and click 'Deactivate this feature' to confirm both of these requests.

Please remember to repeat these steps on every site where you previously activated DocSurvey.

Next, go to the Site Collection level and from 'Site Settings' select 'Site Collection Features' and deactivate all DocSurvey features.

You will again receive warning messages (like the ones above) asking for you to confirm that you wish to deactivate the features.

Repeat this procedure for any other Site Collections where you originally activated DocSurvey features.

Finally, go to SharePoint Central Administration and from the 'Application Management' menu select 'Manage Web Applications'.

Select the relevant web application and under 'Web Applications' in the top menu bar, select 'Manage Features'.

Deactivate the 'DocSurvey Web Application Features' (again you will receive a warning message requesting you to confirm this action).

Once all of the DocSurvey features have been disabled you will be able to use a DocRead only licence key.