How to conduct online polls

Online polls is a great way to collect user data on the popularity of an individual, organization, or a product.

Let’s suppose you want to survey your users on the best Android phone for 2020, you can create an online poll and find out how many users voted for the smartphone. It’s akin to what you see on the tech websites, but this time you can do it in a dedicated form.

Here’s how to run your online polls.

  1. First things first, for this feature to work, you need to enable Allow external references to work when creating a new form. Now head over to the Data Binding tab and click Poll Picker.

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  2. You will now see the options for Polls in the Property tab. Scroll down and you will see external form ID and the external element ID. We will get to it later. For now, let’s add our options without the use of external references. Under the Poll Pre-defined Candidates, you can simply enter the names of options. In our case, these are Android smartphones. Now for this option to work, you also need to enable the Using Pre-defined candidates option. This will signal your form that even in the case of external form ID and external element ID, only use the pre-defined poll data from this form.

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  3. Now Hit Save and View the form. You will see the options as follows.

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  4. Once you select the option, click Submit. Your response will now be recorded. Similarly, if you want to see the user submissions, head over to Form Records and click on User Records. You can see that there are 7 user responses so far, and each response is recorded against their name.

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  5. But how would you know which Android smartphone got the most votes? It’s quite simple. Just click any one of the poll result and in a new dialog box, you will see the poll results:

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Hmm. Seems like users were more inclined toward Samsung Galaxy S20 FE, and Nokia and Oneplus ended out as ties.

Similarly, if you want to use Online Polls with external references, this is how it works:

For external reference to work, it is important that the Allow external references in this form is checked. This ensures that the data can be imported in the Polls. We already discussed the pre-defined poll criteria for online polling, so let’s move to external referencing for polls.

Before starting, whilst creating your form, you need to check the Allow external references in this form as follows:

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  1. It is important that you have 2 forms created, one for the online poll, and the other from where you want to fetch in the data. In this case, we will be using another form from where we will be fetching data. In our current form, we will move from Pre-defined selection list to external form. So go ahead and create a new form from where you want to collect the data from. We will run the same Best Android Phone in Year 2020 poll.

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  2. The Element ID Inputbox2 is what we will use as our external element ID for our user poll form as follows:

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  3. Now that the data is linked, once your users start filling up the external form, the data will be imported in the User Poll form. We can now see the User Records populated in the User Form (the external form) as follows. It is important to note that this is NOT the poll data, but the data that will be used as a basis for external referencing in the poll form:

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  4. Once you Save and View the main form where we are running the poll, you can now see all these three options.

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