It’s a great new tool from Microsoft that allows you to quickly and easily create surveys, quizzes and polls. There is a wide variety of potential uses for these. You could use them to get customer feedback, collect reviews and testimonials or even use them as data entry forms. I’m using these using these forms in my courses to get student feedback and reviews so I can improve my teaching. I also suggested them to a friend who was looking for a simple data entry solution. Let’s take a look!
Sign Up For Microsoft Forms
If you’re signed up with Office 365, then you already have Microsoft Forms and it can either be accessed from OneDrive, SharePoint, Excel Online or the Forms website. If you don’t have an Office account, then you can still sign up to use forms for free here https://forms.office.com/ by creating a Microsoft account.
Creating a New Form or Quiz
There are a couple different ways to create a form or quiz with Microsoft Forms.
Creating a Form in OneDrive
You can create forms inside OneDrive personal or business. Navigate to the folder where you want to store your form results ➜ click on New ➜ select Forms for Excel. You will then be asked to name the workbook associated with your form. This workbook will be saved in your chosen folder and will be where all the form submissions will be saved.
Creating a Form in SharePoint
The same thing can be done to create a form if you have an Office 365 business account with SharePoint online. Navigate to the folder where you want to store your form results ➜ click on New ➜ select Forms for Excel. This also prompts you for a new workbook name where your form submissions will be saved.
Creating a Form in Excel Online
If you’re working with Excel Online, you can also create forms. Go to the Insert tab ➜ click on the Forms button ➜ select New Form from the menu. This will create a form that’s linked to the current workbook.
Creating a Form from the Website
After you sign into https://forms.office.com/ you should be taken to the home page where you can create new forms and quizzes. If you don’t land on the home page, you can always get there from any screen using the button in the top left corner of the screen that’s labelled Forms. From the home screen, click on either New Form or New Quiz.
The Different Types of Questions
Microsoft Forms currently has two types of forms. There are Forms and Quizzes. They both allow you to create the same type of questions. The only difference between them is you can assign point values and correct answers to quiz questions in order to calculate a quiz score. All the questions can be accessed by clicking on the Add new button. This will show the list of available questions choices, but note that some are hidden in a menu accessible by clicking on the Ellipses.
Types of Questions
There are 7 types of questions available. Each has different options.
The Choice option allows you to define a list of possible answers for the user to select one or more answers from.The Text option allows you to create long or short answer text questions.The Rating option allows you to create questions with a star or number rating between 2 and 10.The Date option allows the user to select a date from a calendar to answer the question.The Ranking questions allows a user to drag and drop items to answer questions like order of preference.The Likert option allows you to create “agree/disagree” scale type questions.The Net Promoter Score option allows you to create questions like “How likely are you to recommend [brand X] to a friend or colleague?” that utilize a net promoter style grading.
Tip: Some question types like the Choice and Ranking options allow you to copy and paste from a range in Excel or a line separated text file. This is handy if you have a long list of choices to add.
Each type of question has a different menu. For example, the above picture shows the available options for the Choice style questions.
Form Sections
Sections in forms or quizzes allow you to break up the form into parts. If you have a lot of questions in your form and don’t use sections, then the user would see all the questions on one page. Adding sections means you can break this up into multiple pages and the user will only see the next section of questions after completing the current section. This can help with form submission rates, as seeing long lists of questions can discourage a user from answering all the questions and submitting the form. You can add sections by clicking on Add new ➜ Ellipses menu ➜ Section.
Previewing a Form
When you’ve done creating your form, you can easily preview it and see exactly what a user will see. Click on the Preview button in the top right to view and test the form. Careful though, as submitting the form in preview mode will still add the response to your results and you will have to manually delete the response to remove it from your results. You’ll be able to preview what the form looks like on both mobile and desktop by using the buttons at the top right while in preview mode.
Form and Quiz Settings
Each form has some important settings that can be found in the Ellipses menu.
Form Branching
The above is an example of a form that uses branching. Branching is one of the most useful features in Forms, but it’s unfortunately hidden inside an Ellipses menu. This will allow you to have different questions appear next based on how the user has answered a previous question. To create a conditional form, click on the Ellipses found in the top right ➜ then select Branching.
This example asks the user if they’ve used Microsoft Forms before and gives two options, either Yes or No. If the user selects yes, then they are asked to rate the product out of 5 stars. If the user answers no, then they are asked why not. This way users are not shown questions that are not relevant to them.
Viewing Form Results
At some point, you’re going to want to take a look at the answers that have been submitted by people using your form. This can be done in the Responses tab of any form where you can see a summarized version of the results. In fact, I created a summary link to the above example for which can be viewed here.
Form Themes
There’s not much you can do in order to change the look and feel of your forms, but you can change the colour or background image. Go to the Theme menu in the top right. Here you can select from a couple preset themes or if you click on the plus icon, you can select a custom colour or background image.
Sharing Your Forms
How do are you going to use your new form? The whole point of creating a form is to collect information from users, so after creating a form you’re going to need to share it with your user audience! This can all be done from the Share menu in the top right.
Conclusions
If you need to collect information from different users, then Microsoft Forms might be the tool for you. With forms, you can quickly and easily create questionnaires that you can share both internally or externally from your work. These forms will automatically collect and store the responses inside an Excel workbook so they can be easily viewed and analyzed later. It’s another great tool in the Office suite that works well with Excel and is one you’re definitely going to want to explore using.
