website/excel questions

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

I hope I am correct forum. I am so clueless, I don’t know where to start… Given: I have no coding skills but have time to learn some basics. I’d rather use existing templates/software as opposed to building my own. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I own a website and am playing with Wordpress to publish content.

I have a spreadsheet that I want to put online in a website. The spreadsheet requires users to answer questions…select a choice from a list, enter numbers… and then the spreadsheet makes calculations based on that input. After all of the questions (user input) is complete, the website will take you to a page that shows the “what-if” of their input". What is the best way (by that I mean attractive looking and ease of use to ask the question and then input that answer into a spreadsheet cell? I would like to have 1 question on a page with a “next” button that takes you to the next question. I might also want to “Flow chart” the questions…ie. if you answer "yes "to a question, you go to following question A, but if you answer “no”, it takes you to question B.

I just need to know what software I should be looking at to get the job done. I’ll work on figuring out how to use it.

#2

Perhaps you could try Google Forms?

#3

Yeah, what you want are forms and a rudimentary database - I’d guess it can be done in excel but I’m betting it’d be a pain

#4

You can’t directly convert your spreadsheet for a website. There is no automatic way to do it.

The spreadsheet logic needs to be re-written by a programmer, with forms, buttons, pages, etc. for the web. You’ll need to hire a freelance programmer to do it for you.

#5

I saw Google Forms. Yes that is exactly what I was thinking of…except… I think Google Forms is more of a survey. It seems to tabulate your responses into a running count of which answer is selected. I don’t think it takes your answer to a question and deposit that data into a cell. Correct me if I’m wrong.

I was afraid that I’d have to hire someone. There’s a lot of hours involved that probably makes this impractical.

Assuming that I want to put in the time and do this myself- much of the coding is repetitive with only slight nuanced change (the nuanced change and need for regular updates is what makes this not cost effective to hire out)- what software do I start learning? Dreamweaver? Can this be done on Wordpress?

#6

No, answers are not selected unless you tell the spreadsheet where the data is saved from forms to do so. There is a way to select different answers on a form before hand: one can set it up like a quiz for students at school, the answers chosen go the spreadsheet after one submits a form with the selections made already. After each form submission the spreadsheet grows a row.

I usually end up doing basic work with the editor of Seamonkey and then I embed or link to the google forms I make on the web-page, then I check the spreadsheets with the data that was made with the forms in google drive.

#7

GIGObuster… thanks. I originally designed the spreadsheets in Google Sheets. I played with Google Forms and like the look but I didn’t know for sure whether it would do what I want. I’ll dig deeper now that I know it will. Do you have any websites I could go to to look at an embed vs a link?

#8

I don’t have any good advice on how to do what you want to do, zydecat, but your guess that this might not be the right forum is right. Cafe Society is really for entertainment topics (movies, TV, music, books, etc.), and this sounds more like a topic for the General Questions forum. I’ll flag this thread for a moderator to look at, and move to the more appropriate forum.

#9

Actually, on further thought, it sounds a lot like you’re wanting to essentially do a custom survey. You may want to look at survey websites like SurveyMonkey. One issue is that formatting the survey pages to look like your website (if that’s what you want to do) may cost some money.

#10

[Moderating]

You might start by reading the forum descriptions. This forum is about the arts and culture, which does not include database design. Moved to IMHO.