Isn't Technology wonderful?

I'm taking a Consumer Behavior class at UCF. One of our group projects requires creating a survey about 2 competing products and comparing them using a certain matrix based on the answers to the various questions. The first 6 questions are general questions about certain "values" where the respondants give an answer on a certain scale of how important that "value" is to them. Then you ask them about if how each product corresponds to those "values" . Examples of the value question would be : "How important do you consider convenience to be when choosing a theme park?" This would be answered on a scale, of say, 0-5. Then, they would be asked, "Do you believe Disney is convenient" on a scale of 1-5. I would take those two scores and multiply them together and I would have my results. After several questions like this I could then compare the total scores of Disney and Universal and get a pretty good picture about which park is preferred by the sample. I could also look at individual categories and learn how each park does in the various categories.

To accomplish this, I used Google Docs to create a form where I asked each of the questions and provided multiple choice answers for the scale that I wanted. I then posted the link to the quiz in my Facebook status, as well as emailing it to my group members so they could email it to still more people. Google records the answers in a form similar to an Excel Spreadsheet. So, all I had to do then was copy and paste the information over into a real Excel Spreadsheet. I called this Sheet of the Workbook "Raw Scores". Then I created a second sheet in the same workbook, called "Scores Calculated", that pulled the info from "Raw Scores" and did all the math I talked about earlier automatically. As soon as I pasted the new results in "Raw Scores", "Scores Calculated" had the math done.

Now, I can sort the data or evaluate the data anyway I want. Not to mention, the ability to survey hundreds of people in a matter of a couple of days! It's simply amazing how much technology is helping me, some might say that technology is doing most, if not all, of the work for me. I feel kind of bad for people in my class who don't know about these great resources we have. I know some of them are typing up surveys and then handing them out to people to fill out by hand with a pen and paper, and then typing the results in or doing all the math by hand.

I love technology! I love how easy it can make life!