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Microsoft Forms Blog
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Pre-fill Responses in Your Microsoft Forms

junyuB's avatar
junyuB
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
May 17, 2024

We are excited to share that Microsoft Forms now supports pre-filled links, making your data collection process more efficient and improving data accuracy. This feature not only allows you to set default answers for your questions, it empowers you to strategize how you would like the responses categorized. To help you better understand how to leverage this new feature, let's try it together with an online training feedback survey. You can also try to pre-fill a form from this template.  

 

Imagine your company conducted three online training sessions for participants in different time zones: Asia, Europe, and North America, each with a different lecturer. To streamline the process and avoid creating separate feedback forms for each session, you decide to use Forms pre-filled links to consolidate all feedback into a single form. 

 

Find the pre-fill link from “…” icon 

After creating your feedback survey, click on the "..." icon in the upper right corner and select "Get Pre-filled URL" to start setting your pre-filled answers. 

 

Pre-fill link from “…” icon

Set pre-filled answers 

Before setting pre-filled answers, you need to first activate "Enable pre-filled answers" in the top section of the form. After that, you can proceed to select pre-filled answers. In this case, the prefilled answers would be the session participated in and the lecturer's name. 

 

Set prefilled answers

Send out the pre-fill link to different audiences 

Once you’ve finished setting up the pre-filled answers, you can click the “Get Pre-filled link” button at the bottom of the form to copy/paste the URL for distribution. In this scenario, since you have three different sessions and lecturers, you'll need to generate three different links with different prefilled answers before sending the form to the corresponding audience. 

 

Send out prefill link

Recipients open the survey with pre-filled answers 

When participants who attended the Asia session opens the survey, they will see that "Asia session" and "John Wang" have already been selected. They can then proceed to answer the remaining questions and submit the form. 

 

Survey with pre-filled answers

Here are two additional real-life use cases to provide inspiration on how this feature can benefit you: 

  • End-of-semester university course evaluations: Fields such as course name and instructor name can be pre-filled to track feedback from multiple courses in one form. 
  • Customer feedback survey: pre-fill fields like employee name, service period, and department. 

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Updated Mar 26, 2025
Version 3.0

47 Comments

  • PaulCDutton's avatar
    PaulCDutton
    Copper Contributor

    This is a really nice move towards missing functionality and I'm looking forward to implementing.

     

    However, the character limit is still 256, which is not an issue with the initial URL link, but if I try to ad any dynamic input the character limit sets back in and causes a value error. The form id takes up literally half the character limit and the question ids are so long that '&[question id]&' takes up 35 characters. Only 2 or 3 dynamic inputs can be used before breaching the 256 limit. 

     

    This is really preventing the pre-filled link form being utilised effectively within hyperlink functions in excel etc.

  • martinrutar's avatar
    martinrutar
    Copper Contributor

    Finally going in the right direction, but:

    - why I can't save pre-filled form and use it another time?

    - when client sends corrected pre-filled form, why I can't use it as another pre-filled form? Like an every year survey for clients, where they can see their last years answers?

     

    Tnx

  • TakuyaHirose's avatar
    TakuyaHirose
    Brass Contributor

    junyuB 

    For a starting point, I think it's a great idea.

    However, to make it even more useful, I feel there are still some missing functionalities.

    Specifically, what I think is needed is the ability to hide pre-filled question items from the respondent. In other words, since you can create multiple URLs with different pre-filled values/responses for one or more question items from a single Form, and send them to the appropriate respondents, there may be cases where you don't want the respondents themselves to be able to change or edit the responses for those items.

    And, if a question item is not meant to be answered or edited, there's no need to show that item to the respondent at all.