There are times when you might have wanted an easy way to collect information from people and analyze it in a spreadsheet program. For instance, you want to organize a pot luck party at your office. While coordinating this might seem to be too hard, you can make things simpler. Instead of talking with the invited people face-to-face or on the phone, you can send out a form and get them to fill in the details that can then be saved into an easily readable spreadsheet. This article deals with a scenario where you have to make a form which will ask users their names and what they will bring to the 'Pot Luck Party'.

There are three ways one can make and send forms to people. One method is to create a form document using a word processor such as MS Word, Corel WordPerfect, ThinkFree Write or OpenOffice.org Writer. You can then e-mail the document to the survey takers and record their answers in a spreadsheet program. The second method is to create a form in PDF format using Adobe or similar applications followed by e-mailing and recording responses. The third method is to use Google Docs to create a survey on a Web page, the link to which you can then send to the recipients and record their answers on a spreadsheet.