Computer Based Quizzing, Testing and Surveying
(updated for use at Georgetown College)

• Before you Begin
• Touring FrontPage
• Using Web Templates
• Getting Help
• Download this Workshop

What you will do:

• Use Web Templates
• Use the Form Page Wizard
• Acquire input from users
• Validate user input
• Save user input
• View saved user input

Computerized data collection has been around for years. The ability to quickly collect test or survey results and accurately assess the data has, until now, been a luxury of large research groups or major testing bodies. Fortunately, times have changed. The web has evolved as a medium by which many costly endeavors in the past are now in reach of the masses. Computerized testing and surveying are now commonplace tools to be used by administrators, faculty and students. In this hands-on session, you will learn to easily create interactive forms for online testing and surveying without having to be a systems programmer (or have one as a good friend). We will create online tests and/or surveys and store the results in text files, spreadsheets, and/or databases on your server. In subsequent workshops, we will analyze the collected data using Microsoft Excel and Access. Whether you want to monitor the opinions and performance of your students, or your students need to conduct their own studies and analyze the results as a class assignment, this session is for you! Before You Begin FrontPage is Microsoft's primary user based web site authoring and management program. It has many powerful features, yet is still easy to master. FrontPage allows you to create individual web pages, entire web sites or just update existing ones. Some of the functionality is enabled by server extensions. These extensions need to be loaded onto the server that the web content will be published on. Fortunately, FrontPage server extensions are available for most of today's popular web servers. If you wish to see the current list just point your browser to http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/ . Testing of your web pages are made easy by previewing them in your favorite browser. When you are ready to publish your creation to a live web server simply click the Publish button and specify the server you wish to use and that's it! Files You Will Need For This Workshop: The following files will be used during the labs for this workshop. Download to your hard drive by clicking on the file names. These files will need to be copied to Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\1033\Webs in order to show up as a template in the New dialog box during the lab. Classweb.tem

Words to know: HTML -HyperText Markup Language (language used to format web pages). World Wide Web -The collection of interconnected computers on the Internet that display content based on HTML. Browser -A program that allows you to view HTML formatted documents. (Microsoft® Internet Explorer). Forms -Web pages that allow you to ask a user to fill in information, which is then stored for later analysis. URL -Uniform Resource Locator (name and location of a file or web page. Microsoft® FrontPage 2000 -The latest version of Microsoft's web authoring and management program used to create and manage web sites and pages with no knowledge of programming in HTML. Seamless integration with the Microsoft Office family of applications. Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5.0 -The latest version of Microsoft's popular web browser. It allows editing and displaying of web pages. Collaboration on standard office documents through discussions and round-tripping.

Touring FrontPage

Before you start developing your own web content, become familiar with the features of FrontPage. The following illustration shows the Navigation view:

Using Web Templates

As a contributor for the campus newspaper, you have decided to write and editorial piece on the Year 2000 issue or as it is known, Y2k. You need to collect opinions on this issue to supplement your article and your obvious data collection tool is a web-based survey. Let's start by creating a web that will house your survey. This section describes how to quickly create a basic class web site. You will use the New FrontPage Web Wizard to create a web from a template, name your web, and pick the web server. The following illustration shows the dialog box that is presented to create a new web from a wizard or a template:

The Class Web is one of the templates added by the themes and templates add-on pack available on the Microsoft web site. Be sure to check the FrontPage section of the Microsoft web site for enhancements, updates and breaking news regarding FrontPage.

To Create web sites or pages with wizards Start FrontPage. On the File menu, click New then click Web . Click Class Web. Type the address of your computer's web server in the Specify the location of the new web box. Then click OK . When the web has been created you are left in the navigation view with the organizational structure of your new web apparent in the content pane. We now have to create the survey and add it into the organizational structure of our site.

You can test your webs on your own computer. To test content that requires a web server, you can use a locally installed web server such as Microsoft Personal Web Server.

Creating Forms to Acquire Input From Users Forms are valuable data collection tools for web sites. In a nutshell, forms allow a user to respond to questions that are presented in a variety of ways. It becomes your job to choose the best constructs to collect the appropriate responses from the individual filling out the form. We have chosen to create a survey here in this workshop but, you could create a test or quiz just as easily In this section you will create a survey using text boxes, combo boxes, multiple choice, and true/false. After you create the questions, we will go into validating the data collected. This is very important because the old saying "garbage in garbage out" rings very true. You will also decide on the storage repository for the results of the form. The survey results can be stored in a text file, a spreadsheet, or a database. Finally we will look at the data you have collected. It may seem like a lot to do but, you could use a wizard to make relatively light work of the whole process. Your only real effort will be coming up with the questions and deciding which form construct would be the best one to use for collecting respondents answers.

The ease of web page creation is enabled by FrontPage Server Extensions on the web server. If you do not wish to use these features you may disable features that require these extensions from the Options menu.

To create a new page On the File menu, click New and click Page . - or- Press CTRL+N . Right click on the new page in Navigation View and click Rename . Type in Survey in the page title box and press Enter to save your changes. Double-click on the page to change to Page View . Type in a brief synopsis at the top of the survey to describe to the perspective respondent as to why they should take the time to fill out the form.

Radio buttons get their name from your car radio. Use them when you want to have the user select one item from a short list.

Adding Form Objects to a Page

1. From the Insert menu, click Form then click One-Line Text Box .
2. Press Enter to move the submit/reset buttons to a line by themselves and position cursor just to the left of the box.
3. To the left of the text box type Please enter your age . Position cursor to the right of the text box and press Enter .
4. Right click on the text box and select Form Field Properties . Type age in the Name box and click OK .
5. Type in To what degree are you going to be affected by the Y2k problem?
6. From the Insert menu, click Form then click Drop Down Menu .

   

7. Right click on the drop down box and select Form Field Properties . In the Name box type scope .
8. Click Add and on the Add Choice dialog box type in the first choice for the user and click OK . Repeat this twice to add two more choices in the drop down box.
9. After the last choice is entered, click OK . The dialog box closes.
10. Click to the right of the drop down box and press Enter .
11. Type What industry do you think will be the most affected? and press Shift+Enter .
12. From the Insert menu, click Form then click Radio Button and type Banking/Finance . Press Shift+Enter . Right click on the radio button and select Form Field Properties . Type industry in the Group name box and type banking/finance in the Value box and then click OK . Click on the line directly below the line you are on.
13. From the Insert menu, click Form then click Radio Button and type Government . Press Shift+Enter . Right click on the radio button and select Form Field Properties . Type industry in the Group name box and type government in the Value box and then click OK . Click on the line directly below the line you are on.
14. From the Insert menu, click Form then click Radio Button and type Transportation . Press Shift+Enter . Right click on the radio button and select Form Field Properties . Type industry in the Group name box and type transportation in the Value box and then click OK . Click on the line directly below the line you are on.

    

15. From the Insert menu, click Form then click Radio Button and type Manufacturing . Right click on the radio button and select Form Field Properties. Type industry in the Group name box and type manufacturing in the Value box, then click OK . Click to the right of the line and press Enter
16. Type I am prepared for Y2k and press Shift+Enter . From the Insert menu, click Form then click Radio Button and type true and a space. From the Insert menu click Form then click Radio Button and type false . Right click on the first radio button and type prepared in the Group name box and true in the Value box, then click OK . Right click on the second radio button and type prepared in the Group name box and false in the Value box and then click OK . Click at the end of the line and press Enter .
17. Type The most vulnerable areas in my organization are: and press Shift+Enter .
18. From the Insert menu click Form the click Check Box and type Hardware . Press Shift+Enter . From the Insert menu, click Form then click Check Box and type Operating Systems . Press Shift+Enter. From the Insert menu click Form then click Check Box and type User Data & Custom Applications . Press Shift+Enter. From the Insert menu, click Form then click Check Box and type Applications .
19. Right click on the check box beside hardware and select Form Field Properties . Type hardware in the Name box and type -1 in the Value box, then click OK . Repeat this for the remaining check boxes, but replace the Name box with os , enduser and applications , respectively.
20. From the File menu click Save . You may want to save as you go to protect your work in progress. This is especially true in a long form.

Validating User Input

Now that you have placed the questions on your survey, to collect user responses, it is advisable to put in place a checking mechanism to verify that the collected data is reasonable. You may also wish to block the submission of a form without certain questions being completed. You will accomplish this with the Validate option in the Form Field Properties dialog box.

To Validate Data

1. Right click on the text box that we asked the user to enter their age and click Properties . Click the Validate button.

   

2. On the Text Box Validation dialog, click on the Data type drop down and select Number .
3. Click the check box to the left of Field must be and type 15 in the Value box. Click the check box to the left of And must be and type 100 in the Value box.
4. Click OK and then click OK a second time to close the properties dialog.
5. Right click on the false radio button and select Form Field Validation . Type Y2K Preparedness in the Display name box and click the Data required check box. Click OK to accept your changes.

Saving User Input

You now have an important decision to make. What do you do with the data when the user submits the form? The three common storage structures are text files, spreadsheets, and databases. A script can also be used to process form data, but that requires programming. Scripts would be necessary if you wished to have your data stored on the campus mainframe database or the like.

To save form results to a text file

1. Right click on a blank area of the form and select Form Properties . Type in the path to the file in the Send to File name box. The file name should end in .txt to indicate a text file.
2. Click OK to save your changes and close the dialog.
3. Choose a location in which to save the attachment(s) and click Save .

Now that you have setup the means to collect and store collected the data, we can test our work and examine the results. You will take the survey you just created and view the contents of the file that is stored your responses. FrontPage, by default, locates all data within the structure of your web.

1. On the File menu, click Save to save your changes.
2. On the File menu, click Preview in Browser and click Preview to open Internet Explorer with your survey as the active page (Make sure to test your survey with several different browsers to verify its appearance and operation.
3. Take the survey and click the Submit button when you are done. (Don't forget to try out the validation parameters we put in place).
4. Close the browser window and you should be returned to FrontPage.

1. Click the Folders button on the Views Bar and look at the Folder List . The default storage container for text files is in the _private folder.
2. Double click on the appropriate folder in the Folder List based on the type of file you chose to store your data in.
3. Double click on the file in that folder and FrontPage will open it in the appropriate application. In this case the file will probably be survey with the appropriate extension.

At any time while you are using FrontPage, you can get help from the Office Assistant or the online Help. To open the Office Assistant, click the FrontPage Help button on the standard toolbar. To open the online Help, on the Help menu click Microsoft FrontPage Help . If you have an Internet connection, you can also point to Office on the Web on the Help menu and choose from several resources that may be of interest to you such as Product News , Frequently Asked Questions , and Online Support . Don't forget to visit the FontPage web site for all the latest information.