Using LimeSurvey as a Survey Tool

We were in search of a good survey tool, and after some research came upon LimeSurvey (www.limesurvey.org). We found it extremely easy to set up and use and allowed for professional surveys with features commonly found in commercial products.

The following lists its main features:

• Unlimited number of surveys at the same time
• Unlimited number of questions in a survey (only limited by your database)
• Unlimited number of participants to a survey
• Multi-Lingual Surveys
• User-Management
• 20 different question types with more to come
• Creation of a printable survey version
• Ability to set conditions for questions depending on earlier answers (branching the survey)
• Re-usable editable answer sets
• Ready-made importable questions
• Assessment surveys
• Anonymous and Not-Anonymous survey
• Open and closed group of participant surveys
• Optional public registration for surveys
• Sending of invitations, reminders and tokens by email
• Option for participants to buffer answers to continue survey at a later time
• Cookie or session based surveys
• Template editor for creating your own page layout (CSS based!)
• Extended and user-friendly administration interface
• Back-office data entry possibility
• Survey expiry dates for automation
• Enhanced import and export functions to text, CSV and MS Excel format
• Basic statistical and graphical analysis with export facility

The installation requires a PHP/MySQL server. Installation is very easy. A quick summary of the steps are:
1) unzip the files to the directory you want
2) set read/write permissions to the tmp and template directories
3) edit the config.php file to point to your MySQL database

You can find the complete manual (including an installation guide) here:
http://docs.limesurvey.org/tiki-index.php

The only issue we encountered is that you need to enable the Multibyte string extension in PHP.