Im trying to create a survey, but have no idea how to calculate the answers:

I've made a list of categories, however there is no definite answers to the
questions e.g. It isn't multiple choice for example where I have given 5
possible answers and the person can only pick from these answers, it is left
to the person's own opinion.

Once I have a decent number of replies I can then sort out the most popular
responses.

The responses are in text form.

Do I have to come up with some numbers that represent each response to a
given question or can excel calculate text , finding certain words in answers
for example or would Access be better for this type of thing