MicrosoftWarning: This synch feature is thoroughly unreliable from Forms to Excel.
I've rigorously tested the synch and it works ~85% of the time for new responses. Sometimes I have to refresh manually in Excel. Sometimes the new changes come through, sometimes they don't. There doesn't seem to be a pattern to failure of synch.
This synch feature it's simply just not dependable for proper businesses. Also, crucially the deletion of responses doesn't pass through to the Excel sheet. (Vice-versa, a minor issue - deletion of rows doesn't propagate back so the form responses are deleted.)
It's like the software feature was developed by agency programmers who simply built a skeleton of a synch solution and then didn't test it. The plan was then to wait for users to complain that the feature doesn't work and so they get re-employed to fix the feature that was never properly tested in the first place. Very poor Microsoft management. Again.
Microsoft is known the world over for poor development and deployment. Legions of users raise their eyes! It's Microsoft, what do you expect! (It's not getting any better, it's getting worse.)
I'm no fan of Google, but Google Forms in comparison to Microsoft Forms, are so easy and smooth. I was up and running doing data science on form responses in 15 minutes. So darn easy in Google. Synch was perfect using their API to pull data through to R or Python. Simply dependable. I guess because it's actually tested.
In comparison the Microsoft Forms "experience" is packed full of basic bugs, a lack of features, astonishing unreliability in many areas and very very poor testing. I've spent weeks trying to circumvent bugs in Microsoft Forms that are blatant to any half-competent tester. There are at least 15 major bugs I know of in Microsoft Forms. I guess we'll have to wait for the ancient rusty machinery of Microsoft to bug fix those basics over the next 2 years. Again.
