# 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](http://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 (<span class="caps">CSS</span> based!)
- Extended and user-friendly administration interface
- Back-office data entry possibility
- Survey expiry dates for automation
- Enhanced import and export functions to text, <span class="caps">CSV</span> and MS Excel format
- Basic statistical and graphical analysis with export facility

The installation requires a <span class="caps">PHP</span>/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](http://docs.limesurvey.org/tiki-index.php)

The only issue we encountered is that you need to enable the Multibyte string extension in <span class="caps">PHP</span>.