Recently I've been working on a project to package about 1500 applications for distribution through SCCM. To gather the information I need, I wrote a 50-question survey for a few hundred people to answer. The challenge was to get this survey to a large audience and turn the results into actionable information.
Now, you should be able to use Microsoft Forms using this article, and you can perform below things: Sign up for a Microsoft Forms using your educational or work account. Create survey, quiz, and questionnaire for students and others. Integration with OneNote, OneDrive, and Microsoft Flow.
There are a variety of services available online for running surveys. This customer is using Office 365, so I wanted to make use of their existing resources. Today, Office 365 has two solutions for running surveys:
- Step 1: Create your Microsoft Form Step 1: Create your Microsoft Form. Step 2: Create a SharePoint List. Step 3: Link a Form to the SharePoint List.
- Microsoft Forms (Preview) Microsoft Forms is a new part of Office 365 Education that allows teachers and students to quickly and easily create custom quizzes, surveys, questionnaires, registrations and more. This action retrieves a form response. Unique identifier of the form. Unique identifier of the response.
- Microsoft Forms. Microsoft Forms is an Office 365 application for creating online surveys or quizzes. In the above screenshot you can see the first few questions of the survey I wrote using Microsoft Forms. There are also options for adding a new question to the survey.
- Microsoft Forms
- SharePoint Online Survey app
In this article, I’m going to walk through both Microsoft Forms and the SharePoint Online Survey app. After reading this article, you’ll understand the pros and cons of each option. My goal is to help you make a decision about which option to use if you have a need to run surveys for your organization.
Microsoft Forms
Microsoft Forms is an Office 365 application for creating online surveys or quizzes.
In the above screenshot you can see the first few questions of the survey I wrote using Microsoft Forms. There are also options for adding a new question to the survey. Question types range from multi-choice, to simple text boxes and ratings. Everything is straight forward, and simple to use. I was able to make a good-looking survey with very little effort or knowledge.
The below screenshot shows a view of the responses that are recorded. The survey owner is shown the responses and how popular specific answers are. There is also an option to access this data in Excel.
Simplicity and ease of use are strengths of Microsoft Forms. The trade-off is that Forms is less flexible than the SharePoint Online Survey app. At least, that is the case right now. Forms is a new application, and ongoing development will no doubt continue to add features.
SharePoint Online Survey
The Survey app within SharePoint Online is much more detailed, and thus more difficult to use. Adding a survey to SharePoint Online starts with adding the Survey app to a site. This requires you to have permissions to create lists on the site.
There are more options in the Survey app for creating different types of questions. For power users, this added complexity is useful, but for the average user it can be confusing.
For survey respondents, the user experience is not as well designed as it is for Microsoft Forms. SharePoint does allow for custom styling and theming of pages and sites if you want to make the survey look nicer. But that requires more investment of time.
One of the benefits of SharePoint is the ability to put in default text, as shown in the phone number field below. I find this feature to be very helpful when you want to give respondents hints for the format you're expecting the answers to be in.
Within SharePoint the survey owner is given a simple RSS display of the responses to her survey. This view is not as graphical as the view given by Forms, but it is very functional. SharePoint Online also give the survey owner the option to export survey data into Excel.
Microsoft Forms vs SharePoint
Forms and SharePoint surveys provide two similar solutions. Forms is easier to use, which makes it a better solution for people who are not SharePoint administrators. SharePoint Online provides a more mature and feature rich solution, but it is more complicated to use.
For my specific situation, I ended up using Forms for my survey. The primary reason was so that I could collect responses from people who did not have accounts within the Office 365 tenant. Microsoft Forms allows for easier external guest access. SharePoint Online no longer supports public facing sites. So, for anyone to use my SharePoint survey they need to authenticate into Office 365.
If you are a SharePoint Online power user or administrator, then the SharePoint solution gives you more flexibility. For the rest of us, Microsoft Forms provides the ease of use to make creating surveys quick and easy.
Nathan is a Microsoft Certified Solutions Master: Messaging and a Microsoft MVP for Office Servers and Services, living in Portland, Oregon. He specializes in Exchange, Office 365, Active Directory, Azure and a bit of Skype for Business.
If you’ve been using tools like SurveyMonkey to send outquestions to your customers and then analyse the results, you might not beaware of Microsoft Forms.
Microsoft Forms, much like SurveyMonkey, allows you tocreate surveys in Office 365, and either share them to authenticated userswithin your organization, or with anonymous respondents anywhere.
Usually when you are collecting data back from forms andusing it for work purposes, like client satisfaction surveys or pre-engagementquestionnaires, you need to have the resulting data accessible by the wholeteam.
By making sure it’s accessible to the whole team, it removesthe reliance on one individual in the team to collate the responses to thesurveys and share with the wider group.
With Microsoft Forms, whilst you can create personal formsand then allow others to work on them with you, a better way is to creategroup-owned forms, so the members of the group all share ownership of the data.By using the group rather than a named individual it also means that shouldsomeone leave the team, the data doesn’t disappear with them.
An easy and intuitive way to create group forms is to use Microsoft Teams to create your Microsoft Forms, edit them with the team, share from Teams and collate and work on the results.
Creating Forms in Microsoft Teams
To create a form in Microsoft Teams, we first need to choosethe right team and channel to create the form within.
Typically, this will be the Team assigned to the team,department or project you are working on. You can then create a relevant Channel within the team that’s fit forpurpose. In the example below, we’re using the Team Project Scorpio and have create a channel Client Surveys. At the top of the channel, we’ve got our default Tabs, Conversations, Files and Wiki.We’ll use Add Tab to add our newForm:
When we add a new tab, we’re presented with a large range ofoptions for the various tab-enabled integrations in Microsoft Teams. Forms isbuilt-in, so simply choose Forms fromthe list:
Next, we’ll name our Form. This will be not only the Tab name, but also the name of the formitself – it’s title and how we’ll find it listed if we visit the MicrosoftForms website. In this example, I’ve called the form Pre-engagement Survey:
Once the new Form has been created, we have two sub-tabswithin the Form; Questions and Responses. As the view in Teams is in Edit mode, we won’t answer the formwithin Teams – we’ll use it as the place to manage the form itself. We’ll startoff by adding our initial questions to the form and customize it ready for use:
Once we are happy with the questions within the form andcustomized its colours, pictures and style to meet our needs, we can thenchoose to Share the form so thatresponses can be gathered. We’ll begin the process by selecting the Share icon in the top-right hand corner:
After choosing Share,we can then click on the drop-down list and change the default sharing option “Only people in my organisation can respond”to “Anyone with the link can respond”,which will allow anonymous responses:
![Microsoft Microsoft](/uploads/1/2/4/8/124852564/548730643.jpg)
After copying the link generated, we can then share thatlink with anyone we want to access the survey, create a QR code to share,create HTML to embed the form in a web page, or compose an email with the linkto send to respondents:
When someone responds to the Form, the response will be via a standard webpage. Although we’ve created the form in Teams, that doesn’t mean that responses will be via Teams itself. As we see below, the custom form can be accessed via any supported browser – like equivalent tools such as SurveyMonkey:
Accessing and managing responses
Because it is a Teams form (technically a group form) allthe member of the Office 365 group or Microsoft Team can access the responsesand will see the tab added to the Channel.
In the example below, a message has been posted into thechannel letting team members know about the new form, and this along with thetab (both highlighted) can be selected by any team member to access the form:
After we’ve received some responses, any team member canthen visit the tab, and select the Responsessub-tab to see the results in real-time, as they come in:
Understanding where your form data is stored outside of Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Forms Use Cases
If you look closely in the screenshot above, you’ll alsonotice the option to Open in Excel.If you are wondering where the datalies in Excel, then look no further. It’s easy to find, as it’s stored withinSharePoint, and thus accessible by selecting the Files tab within the channel:
Because it’s stored in SharePoint, that also means that anyteam member can choose the Open inSharePoint option to visit the SharePoint site attached to the team andchoose to get notifications when the survey is updated or synchronize thefolder using the OneDrive client and have access to the survey responses fromthe desktop, even if they are offline.
You can also visit forms.microsoft.comto access and manage your Teams-created form. You’ll find the form listed underthe heading Group forms:
One important note to remember though – like all Office 365 group-enabled services, removing the Team will delete the group form. However, if you do accidentally delete the Channel, you’ll still be able to get back to the Form via both the Microsoft Forms website and see the data in the SharePoint team site attached to the team.
Are you looking for ways to improve the management of Microsoft Teams in your environment? Check out this must-read guide ‘How to Manage Microsoft Teams: An Admin Guide' for the essential tips and tricks for running Teams seamlessly.
Use Microsoft Forms For Survey
Steve is a Microsoft MVP for Office Servers and Services. He enjoys getting hands-on, solving some of the more complex problems associated with migrating to the cloud or to newer versions of Exchange Server.