Are you in charge of doing a survey or conducting a poll? Is e-mail the best way to get in touch with the participants? Do you want to store the data in an Access database or a Microsoft SQL Server™ database? If you answered "Yes" to all these questions, this article will tell you how using data access pages can make these tasks easier for you.

The first step is to create the survey, poll, or form in Access. Create a data access page and specify the appropriate database as its data source. If you are not familiar with creating a page, search Access Help for topics on designing and creating data access pages.

Note  If the survey or the questionnaire exists as a form object in an Access database, create a page based on the form by simply saving it as a data access page. For more information on saving a form as a data access page, see the topic About saving an object as a data access page.

The next step is to send the survey or the data access page to the participants in e-mail. Before you send the data access page, you need to do a couple of things.

• Make sure you have the software necessary to mail the page and that the survey participants have the software necessary to view and edit the page. For a complete list of software requirements for sending and viewing a page, see the topic System requirements for sending and viewing a data access page.
• Make sure you follow the connection and security guidelines for sending a data access page in e-mail. These guidelines will help you protect your survey data from malicious users and, at the same time, make sure your participants can successfully interact with the page. For a list of important guidelines, see the topic About sending a data access page in e-mail.

Now you are ready to mail the data access page. You can set a few options to customize the e-mail messages you are about to send. For example, you can have the replies to these messages sent to another user, such as your supervisor. For more information on setting e-mail options and sending the page, see the topic Set options and send objects in electronic mail from Access.

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