Creating Surveys using OneDrive

I really like surveymonkey. I use it quite a bit. When we want to pick the pizza toppings for Three Thing Game I put up a quick survey and then I have a cunning little Excel spreadsheet that works out how many pizzas I need to order. The only problem I have with the service is that I'm from Yorkshire in England, and this gives me a disposition which is not disposed to parting with money. And the free surveys that you get are great, but for some of the good stuff you have to pay money. 

However, I just found a way of getting free surveys from OneDrive. Better yet, it makes the surveys and delivers the results straight into an Excel spreadsheet that you can work in online. So I might be able to integrate my cunning spreadsheet (Pro tip: around 2.5 students per large pizza seems to work) into this as well. 

You make a new survey by pressing the Create button on the OneDrive website. Select Excel survey and a wizard starts up that will talk you through creating your survey

You can enter a number of different kinds of question, including Yes/No and multiple choice. Each question can have a subtitle if you really want it to.

Finally, when you've finished, you can preview the questionnaire and get a link to it, which can be shortened into a tiny one. You can find my cheese survey here.

The survey results end up in a spreadsheet in your OneDrive storage which you can use as you would any other. When you open it all the responses are there for you to look at. 

Very nice, and I'll be using it for the next Three Thing Game I reckon. 

Cleaning with Notepad

One of my many (and increasing by the day) New Year's Resolutions is to blog things that I find useful. This is a simple enough trick which I use rather a lot, but you might not know it. 

If you move data around from one program to another using the clipboard you often find things attached to the data that you don't want. Sometimes text can have HTML wrapped round it, or perhaps there is some formatting that you want to get rid of. I use Notepad to do this. Drop the text into Notepad and then copy it back out again. Notepad is only good for text, and so it will normally get rid of any unwanted data. It is even easier if you use the keyboard shortcuts:

Click in your Notepad window, CTRL+A to select all the existing text in the Notepad window, CTR+V to paste over it  the text you want to "clean", CTRL+A to select the cleaned and then CTRL+C to copy it. 

There are probably much neater ways of doing this, but it works and you can find Notepad on most any machine. 

“Keep with next” with Word

I’ve been in the lab most of today marking First Year projects. One of the things that we ask the students to do is create a user manual for the program that they write. I reckon that the manual works best if it has headings that direct the reader to particular topics. But that can cause problems….

Sometimes the heading can end up at the bottom of the page, like the rather contrived example above. If you want to stop this happening, you can right click on the heading text (in the example above “Getting a copy of the notes”) and choose “Paragraph” from the menu that appears.

Then you can select “Keep with next” for the paragraph and this means that if you have a page break in the wrong place (as above) then the heading will follow the text over the page.

If you are entering program samples, or things that you don’t want to have split over page breaks you can also use the “Keep Lines Together” setting. If you add this behaviour to styles you can get your documents to lay themselves out automatically.