...what you need to know to build a quick survey with Ask Swift

It is like every other spreadsheet you have used with a familiar menu and toolbar. You can use this to merge cells, format text and insert links and images.

But, unlike other online spreadsheets, each page has three different views:
- a spreadsheet view
- a webpage view
- a table view

You can see these by using the Views menu on the right hand side of the spreadsheet view.

You can make these views public (anyone can see them) or private (only logged in people can see them) and you can make one the default view.

The webpage view is just a webpage

Sometimes spreadsheet data is a 'table'

The table view just lets you sort and reorder that table of data.

The webpage views can contain forms (which post to a spreadsheet table).

This is the basis of Ask Swift - building little forms in spreadsheets which you turn into tiny web sites.

You tweet or e-mail the website address and when people fill in the form you collect the data in an online spreadsheet. You can make the responses public or private by making the replies page public or private with the views menu.

To make a form you just select a range of cells and right-click.

A simple form will be built which you can edit.

The form elements are created using special functions that aren't in normal online spreadsheets, but they are very straightforward.

You can see the function =input(k2) is used to make the input box in cell L2.

There are buttons on the toolbar that create dropdown boxes and radio buttons and so on.

You can do more than just make forms. You can embed almost anything into a cell in the spreadsheet. Whenever a site like YouTube gives you some embed code you can copy and paste that into a cell on your spreadsheet.

There are lots of other functions which are mostly compatible with Microsoft Excel/Open Office.

A tiny-site made can have many different pages (similar to the tabs in a spreadsheet workbook, but not identical).

You work with all your pages using the settings dialog box which you access via the hypernumbers button at the top left of the spreadsheet page.

The settings dialog box lets you:
- create new webpages and spreadsheets
- navigate to particular pages
- upload Excel spreadsheets
- delete pages
- set your password