Back in June, I wrote about Dabble DB, and that at my place of work, we were hoping to use it to keep track of instruction statistics. Things move slowly in academia, so it probably won’t surprise you to hear we’re still using the clunky Access database. (To be fair, we weren’t moving that slowly on purpose – this got paused because it was related to another project that has been slow-moving.)
Luckily, we won’t be using the Access database for long. Starting next semester, we’ll be using Google Spreadsheets – not Dabble. Honestly, I think Dabble is more robust, for a few reasons – one, your data is in a database, rather than a spreadsheet; two, it allows for more variety in data types than Google Spreadsheets (for example, you can tell Dabble that a certain field should have a numerical or date value; you can’t do that in Google). However, since our needs are modest (we don’t really need a database for this) and Google Spreadsheets is free, we’ve gone with Google.
If you’d like, you can take a look at our form here.
I think this form functionality has potential for use by libraries – it’s a simple way to gather statistics or even do a simple survey.
I never realized that you could build forms like this in Google Docs. Will investigate for my own library. Thanks for sharing!
Google forms are awesome. What a great idea for reference stats — thanks for sharing!