Google Forms vs. Microsoft Access

Appropriate Scenarios

• Data collection
• Formative assessment
• Survey/questionnaire
• File uploads (Can be limited to particular sizes or file types).

Inappropriate Scenarios

• Lessons where you need instant feedback to answers rather than waiting for the whole form to be completed.
• File Uploads where not all of the users have Google accounts.

Incentivized

Having worked at startups, I can say Microsoft Access is most suited for their needs. Some of the reasons for that can be the ease and ability to create tables, design an entity-relationship diagram, define the relationship between different tables, feeding data into the tables, and retrieving data. All of this can be curated very easily into a process for small to medium-size enterprises. But a serious limitation can be observed where Access does not provide better features for large-scale companies. Another limitation is for companies where Mac is used as work computers.

Incentivized

• Capture of information from clients and/or consultants for real-time analysis.
• Knowledge evaluation for our work team, the predefined templates allow the creation of tests and knowledge tests that are very didactic and easy to grade.
• The acquired data is cleanly integrated with google spreadsheets allowing for fast and accurate analysis.
• The form completion notifications are customizable and do their job well.

Incentivized

• One good aspect of Microsoft Access is how the software can be customized for different applications. This is very useful because we are able to use this software for multiple applications, which makes it cost-friendly.
• Another strong point of Microsoft Access is the skill required to customize, the amount of programming required is less than most other database programs. This is good for a beginner looking to get into database management.
• Microsoft Access is one of the more cost-friendly database applications, and most of the time it comes with Microsoft Office. Other database programs can be expensive and not as easy to use.

Incentivized

• Edit view limits the questions as seen by viewers. The view function is nice to toggle between to see what the question will look like, but the edit view of some questions (like checkboxes) is confusing for the editor.
• It would be wonderful to be able to assign responses to go to specific users. The user needs to go into the responses section and select the option to receive notifications, versus the owner of the form being able to do that.
• Having a dependency feature for questions (in addition to sections) would be very helpful, so that if a question is answered a certain way, another question appears.

Incentivized

• Generally high learning curve for new users. Especially if they are not comfortable with technology.
• Desktop only program; not available in web-format like other O365 products
• Fewer experienced users, means it's a lot of self-teaching and troubleshooting when you run into an issue

Incentivized

I will definitely renew my use of Google Forms because I really like the ease of use and the number of tools that Google forms provide. I also love that I can administer a test in real-time and get results in a timely manner

Incentivized

I and the rest of my team will renew our Microsoft Access in the future because we use and maintain many different applications and databases created using Microsoft Access so we will need to maintain them in the future. Additionally, it is a standard at our place of work so it is at $0 cost to us to use. Another reason for renewing Microsoft Access is that we just don' t have the resources needed to extend into a network of users so we need to remain a single-desktop application at this time.

The interface is simple and intuitive. The first time you use Google Forms, it has a built in tutorial that goes through all the basics. Most people can pick up how to use it with minimal support. There are some advanced features that require a bit more work but there are plenty of videos and directions online. Google has a great support section that is easy to follow

Incentivized

Microsoft Access is easy to use. It is compatible with spreadsheets. It is a very good data management tool. There is scope to save a large amount of data in one place. For using this database, one does not need much training, can be shared among multiple users. This database has to sort and filtering features which seem to be very useful.

Incentivized

In the years I've used GoogleForms I've never ran into any issues with the reliability or availability. Google is a gigantic company with essentially limitless resources which makes it very easy to trust that I will continue to be able to enjoy the same reliability I've come to know and expect from GoogleForms

Incentivized

I don't think the program has ever failed me. It is one of those programs where there is always a solution if you know where to look.

Incentivized

One of the things that comes as a benefit of the lack to create complex logic branching and truly custom design is that there isn't lot of room to bog down the software. GoogleForms has always loaded just as fast as my internet service and device would allow it. I'm not sure about front end integrations or integrations into the form itself, as I've never explored it, but on the backend, I've never had any issues with integrations channeling from GoogleForms from the GoogleForms's end of things.

Incentivized

I have not had to use Google Forms support - it's always worked as expected. However, with other Google products, I've always been able to find a plethora of resources for answering questions or dealing with issues. The benefit of Google is how widely adopted its products are and how robust its support is.

Incentivized

While I have never contacted Microsoft directly for product support, for some reason there's a real prejudice against MS Access among most IT support professionals. They are usually discouraging when it comes to using MS Access. Most of this is due to their lack of understanding of MS Access and how it can improve one's productivity. If Microsoft invested more resources towards enhancing and promoting the use of MS Access then maybe things would be different.

Incentivized

there is no key idea, since it is easy to implement Microsoft Access

Google Forms is easy to use and affordable. The biggest benefit, however, is that our organization already uses other Google products heavily. Because of this Google Forms was our top choice. Some smaller departments in our organization still use other solutions, such as SurveyMonkey, but as a whole it has been helpful to standardize on a single product.

Incentivized

Excel is a fantastic - robust application that can do so much so easily. Its easy to train and understand. However - excel does not provide a reporting function and that is typically where we will suggest a move to [Microsoft] Access. [Microsoft] Access requires a little more knowledge of data manipulation.

Incentivized

GoogleForms lacks the ability for complex logic branching and the ability to truly design it in a custom manner. It's pretty obvious when you land on a GoogleForm that it is in fact a GoogleForm. This rating solely reflects the lack of flexibility which in turn makes it something that wouldn't usually be scaled. That being said, if needing to scale a simple solution, GoogleForms would be up for the job.

Incentivized

• Google Forms provides us a vehicle to gauge faculty and student response to our online courses and their features in real time so that we can keep our courses updated for students and faculty who facilitate them.
• Since Google is free, provides storage space, and provides Shared Drives (at least in our institutional account), using Google Forms helps us manage our data. We support over 400 courses with thousands of sections so Google Forms helps us manage the data coming out of these courses, mostly student and faculty feedback about what is working and what is not.
• We encourage our faculty to use Google Forms to survey their students for prior knowledge, for interest inventories, and the like. It's incredibly nimble and useful for collecting data quickly and presenting results in easy-to-understand charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Microsoft Access has had a mostly positive impact on our business objectives in that most of our work is funded by grants and those grants need reports with data about our projects. Microsoft Access makes getting and organizing that data very easy.
• Another positive is that since it is built on an Excel backbone, Excel files can be easily imported into Microsoft Access and also it is easy to export Microsoft Access reports, data sheets, etc. into Excel and some other programs as well. That might help more people who already use Excel learn how to work in a database.
• I can't really think of a negative impact other than not many people at my workplace have ever used or understand how to use a database. Most people tend to use Excel rather than a database, like Microsoft Access.

Incentivized