Introduction to Using Microsoft Forms in 10 Minutes

Do you need to collect data from internal or external users? Microsoft Forms is built for this exact purpose! In this 10-minute clip from my Microsoft 365 Fundamentals series on Pluralsight, you will learn how to use Microsoft Forms in only 10 minutes!

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Video Summary

Here are the key points from the video:

• Introduction to Microsoft Forms, highlighting its use for creating surveys and quizzes with various question types.
• Customization options include branching logic, anonymous responses, and limiting responses to one per person.
• Forms can be set to accept responses from anyone or only from people within an organization, with options for anonymity.
• Real-time results are displayed with aggregated data in graphs, and individual responses can be viewed for detailed analysis.
• Forms can be tested and previewed on different devices, and responses can be exported to Excel for advanced analytics.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to this Microsoft 365 services and concept course. My name is Vlad Catrinescu, and I’ll be your instructor for this course. In this module, we will learn about Microsoft Forms, a tool that helps us collect information. Microsoft Forms allows you to create forms such as surveys or quizzes with multiple types of questions. What makes it really easy is that you have so many types of questions built in, not only text but also rating, order, and multiple choice. It’s easy to create the survey and then publish it. You can also implement more advanced things such as branching, so you can add logic and only show certain questions depending on the answers that were given previously.

Microsoft Forms has a ton of different options to help you customize the experience, starting with who can fill out this form. It could be anyone in the world that has the link, or it could be only people from your company. Even then, you can make it anonymous. This way, you can do an anonymous survey inside your organization, allowing only people in your organization to answer while keeping it anonymous but still limiting it to one answer per person. This way, we don’t have someone filling out the form ten times and skewing the results. You also have multiple options for responses, such as setting a start and end date, setting a maximum time duration to answer the form, which is great for quizzes, as well as shuffling the questions. This is great for quizzes because it makes it harder for anyone to look at their friend’s screen to see what they answered.

What also makes Forms easy to use is that you can view the results as soon as answers are submitted. Microsoft Forms will aggregate them using a nice graph, so you can get a feel for the results at first glance. Of course, you can also view the individual results. If you want more advanced analytics, you can even export them to Excel and then run Power BI on them or use Excel’s own business intelligence tools. This way, you can get more advanced analytics.

Great, now that we have seen the theory, let’s head over to the lab and check out Microsoft Forms in action. We are now in the lab environment. Let me open up the browser here where I’m in Microsoft Forms, and I just navigated here from the App Launcher from the top left. I can either create a new form or, if I take a look at the options, I can also create a new quiz. Let me go and create a new form. The first thing it will ask me is the name, so let me enter a name here. We will create an event satisfaction survey. Something you notice as I enter the title is that Microsoft Forms will use its machine learning to actually suggest some questions, which is kind of cool. I can simply add all of them and then already have a form set up. While I’m not really a fan of the order in which it added them, I can simply go in and just drag and drop them. Of course, depending on the form you create, you might not have all the questions that you want, so you can simply go in, click “Add New,” and take a look at the types of questions you have. We have a choice, text, rating, and more. You can specify if it’s a long answer or a short answer, and if it’s required or not. You also have a rating type of question where you can choose the number of stars, thumbs up, smiley faces, or hearts.

I can also add more advanced things. For example, let me add a question here: “What was your most favorite part of the event?” Options could be the food, the speakers, or the location. I can always preview it to see how it looks for the user. You can see how users can rank it and really put it in order. I can also preview it on a mobile device. It’s really easy to create forms. After that, if I go into the settings, I can decide who can fill out this form. I can make it so that anyone can respond, or only people in my organization. I can choose to record the name or not, making it anonymous if needed. I can set the form to accept responses, set a start and end date, and set a maximum time duration for responses. I can shuffle the questions and lock some of them, like the name and email address, at the top. I can also show a progress bar if I have multiple pages and customize the thank you message.

Now, if we click on “Collect Responses,” I can copy and paste the URL. I can also shorten it if I want to. Let’s try it out and answer it. We said everyone can respond, so we can put it in incognito mode. You see, I’m not logged into 365, but I still have access to it. Let’s start answering. “What did you like least about the event?” I put here, “There should have been more desserts,” which is always a valid complaint. “How likely are you to recommend this event to a friend or colleague?” Let’s put five. “Do you have any suggestions for us to improve future events?” Let me type in something: “Have more desserts.” Always a good idea to improve the event. “What did you like most about the event?” The speakers and content. “How satisfied were you?” Let’s put “extremely satisfied.” “How friendly was the staff?” Let’s put “very friendly.” “Was this your first time attending one of our events?” No. “Prior to the event, how much of the information that you needed did you get?” Let’s put “all of the information.” Again, we added all of the questions that Microsoft Forms suggested. Some of them look like copies, and that’s why you should maybe look more before you send the link to your colleagues to make sure they’re in the right order and you don’t have any duplicates like we have now. The machine learning and artificial intelligence can really help us, but it also needs a bit of manual work in the end. Let’s put “somewhat satisfied” here. The speakers, the food, the location—that will be the order. Now let me click on “Submit,” and of course, right now the message is “Your response was submitted.” We could have customized that as well.

Now, if I close this and go to the answers, you can see right now I only have one answer, the one that I did. It took 1 minute and 49 seconds to complete. As more people fill out this form, one of the cool things with Forms is that it will update live. There we go, another answer just came in. You see my average time to complete went up, and directly from here, I really have a nice overview of what happened. “What did you least like about the event?” There should have been more desserts. There was no Q&A. “How likely are you to recommend this event to a friend or colleague?” You see, this was an NPS type of question, a net promoter score. Right now, I have one promoter, zero passives, and one detractor, so we’re at zero. Let’s take a look at another one here: “How satisfied were you with the event?” One extremely satisfied, one very satisfied. “How friendly was the staff?” “Was this your first time attending one of our events?” Everybody said no. So you really have some nice graphs and analytics to allow you to quickly view the answers, but you can always go to “View Results” and see one by one what everybody answered.

This is it for Microsoft Forms, a tool that makes it easy for us to collect information or create quizzes.