Online Surveys Made Easy

FormArtist has extensive templates and a suite of powerful features.

Ramon G. McLeod

Templated forms make Quask's FormArtist survey software easy to use.

There is no better way to find out what your customers want from your business than to ask them. Online surveys can go a long way toward obtaining this vital information, but most software products targeted to smaller businesses skimp on features and options, or prove difficult to use.

Not so with Quask's $899 FormArtist Professional Edition. This software lets polling neophytes easily create, deploy, and tabulate surveys, yet it has a suite of powerful features that will appeal to businesses with moderate survey needs.

You can create a survey from scratch or use templates, which you modify for the questions you need to ask. You place the forms in your own Web page templates to retain the look and feel of your company's site. The templates make the software simple to use. However, creating a custom form requires more time. FormArtist's help files are adequate, but it took me several hours to build a six-page custom form.

When satisfied, deploy your form to a Web server or try it on Quask's test server. To look at the responses, you "fetch" the data back to the PC where the form was originally created, and then you drop it into customer relationship management software or into a database with Open Data Base Connectivity. Most users will likely want to have the data exported as an Excel, CSV, HTML, SPSS, or XML file, which this software does with commendable ease.

The software had one very annoying problem: Setting the tabbing sequences correctly on preexisting form pages with text boxes (an address form, for example) was quite hard to figure out. (The company says it will look at this in future versions.)

Quask FormArtist Professional Edition

Online survey software has extensive templates; its custom forms can be tricky to use. List: $899Current prices (if available)