Forms and stuff

[haarewin]

I'm really planning ahead. for my uni project next year i want to do an online survey about online relationship formation (dont care if you are interested, i need help )
what I would like is to make a form and the results would be put into an excel file (my tutor was saying this is possible as they have one set-up for some other research, but i'd need to set it up myself.) rather than having the results e-mailed to me for every person that fills it in.
does anyone know how to do this? or what i would need to make it work on a webserver?
thanks in advance

 

[wyrd_fish]

you could have it write the results to a file then use excells insert data from text file option

 

[phlash]

Write the results directly to a CSV file - Excel will happily load a CSV.

You definitely want to think about protecting your online survey from abuse (eg: automated posts, repeat posts from the same person etc.) - there are a couple of methods, depending on how paranoid you are:

- put a plain text 'magic number' in the form that has to be typed in correctly
- put a generated image with a 'magic number' in the form (like MSN etc.)
- only allow one post from one IP address (possibly requires a database)

Technology wise - PHP would be ideal, or ASP.NET or JSP - anything that let's you easily write a simple page / form handler with some retained state to perform the above checks and write to a local file on the server.