Excel Tips: Microsoft Forms

Ever needed to get feedback from employers or customers? How about testing people after a training course? What about streamlining internal business processes like expense reimbursement? A form might provide the solution.

There are many online form and survey systems like Survey Monkey, Typeform and Google Forms. Some require a paid subscription to use.

Microsoft has its own version called Microsoft Forms and it is part of the Microsoft 365 subscription. 

You need to login to Microsoft 365 via a browser to access Forms – see Figure 1.

Forms is an online form creator with many Templates to help get you started – see Figure 2.

The Quick Import button enables importing a Word or PDF file with questions/answers.

Microsoft Forms:

• can be shared via email
• can be embedded onto websites
• can be shared within the organisation or made public
• can be anonymous or include the user
• can include images and videos
• uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help populate answers 
• display well on mobile devices
• results can be displayed via a web link
• results are captured in an Excel file on OneDrive.

Update note: A recent change to how forms update means you need to open the Excel file on OneDrive to update the file with the latest form responses.  

Types of questions 

There are currently eight different question types – see Figure 3. 

The ninth option (Section) in Figure 3 adds sections within the form. 

Each type of question has its own set of options. Each question can be set to optional or required.

A brief description of each type of question follows. These include images of the edit screen and the display screen.

Choice

This uses either option buttons (only one answer is allowed) or check boxes (multiple options can be selected). Figure 4 shows the single answer option. The small icon on the end of the question box on the left of the image enables inclusion of an image or video.

On the right of Figure 4, selecting the Other option enables typing a response in the Other box.

Specifying multiple answers enables selecting how many options can be chosen or it can be set to no limit. Turning on the Required setting inserts a small red star under the question – see Figure 5.

When creating a quiz, the correct answer(s) can be specified and separate scores per question can be allocated. In scoring a quiz, you can give some questions higher values than others.

Text

Short- or long-form text responses are possible – see Figure 6.

Rating

You can choose the levels to base the rating and the symbol to display – see Figure 7.

Date

A standard date selector is displayed – see Figure 8. You can’t control the date range displayed.

Ranking

This allows the respondent to move items up or down (drag and drop) to rank them in order. You can also use the arrows on the end of each option to move them. See Figure 9.

Likert

You have no doubt filled in many of these types of questions, now you know what they are called – see an example in Figure 10. 

These allow the collection of multiple responses in a standard scale. In general, you keep this scale consistent between questions. When you use the Section option (described later), changes to the scale can be explained.

Upload File

The user can upload a file to the form. In the case of an expense reimbursement form, users could upload a PDF or photo of the invoice.

Net Promoter Score ©

This is like the Rating, but includes a description on either end of the scale. The scale is set to 10 and can’t be varied. See Figure 11. 

Note: Be careful using the Add branching option as that appears to affect all the questions.

Previewing the form

You can preview the form at any time using the Preview button.

Sharing the form

Click the Collect responses button. You have a few options.

1. Email people from the online interface.
2. Create a URL to share.
3. Create a QR code to share.
4. Create an Embed code to embed the form on a webpage.

Access to the form can be limited to people in the organisation. Responses can also be anonymous.

Some of the Settings options are show in Figure 13. These settings are applied to the whole form.

Viewing the output

The View responses button has a built-in online viewer that visualises the results. Each type of question has a standard display of results. See Figure 14.

The questions are also populated in a formatted table in an Excel file on OneDrive. This means you can set up your own report or dashboard to display the results.

Figure 15 shows the Excel table created by responses to the example questions.

Microsoft Forms provides many options to create useful forms for different situations and is included with the subscription version of Microsoft 365.