Forum Discussion
How to pick email addresses in MS Forms
I wanted to add this graphic to the first message hopefully it will work this time. Selecting choices you can provide the common email addresses and allow users to add a custom email in the text choice of other.
Thanks Dominique Pollard
I am not sure if I got what you are trying to say.
Let me say the issue in another way.
In Forms, if I select "Choice", then I would have to provide a long list of people who might be the answer. While, if I select "Text", then the respondent would have to type the name of the related people which would be definitely a smaller portion of the people group. But, then in Power Automate, where I need to set an automatic email to the mentioned people, I would have to come up with a solution to separate the names and then find their email addresses to send the email to them.
So, if Forms had an option for "Organisation Active Directory" to simply pick the employees with their email addresses in one place, that would be great. Don't you think?
I wanted to add this graphic to the first message hopefully it will work this time. Selecting choices you can provide the common email addresses and allow users to add a custom email in the text choice of other.
Thanks Dominique Pollard
So, I got it right. That's clever but if I don't know exactly who should be in the list to pick from, in the "Other" options, again I would have forced the respondent to type the email addresses which means more possibility of typo mistakes as well as more efforts to exclude the email addresses from the records while trying to automate the flow per each form submission.
The best solution would be having a field in Forms connected to the business active directory which pick quickly the email of people by typing a couple of their names alphabets.
I totally agree.
My purpose would be slightly different, to have fill in a form that triggers a flow, using the (VALID!) internal email addresses to send out a notification.
I appreciate community members offering suggestions, but it is frustrating when they do not acknowledge they are answering a different question. IMO It would be more beneficial to have a categorical answer that something cannot be done, so 'you and I' can stop looking for the impossible.
(I am assuming that you never found a method to add email addresses to a Form, or any other similar MS application?)
Fully agree with ShN2020 and ChrizK.
I have been using Forms since it first appeared and it is a pain that there is no people picker field available.
I ended up going the same way as Dominique Pollard, but my form has about 30 options for email contacts, which means that the form needs updating if department managers change. A user used a text input field in their form, but this leads to constant issues where other users of the form then mistypes an address, add a name instead of an address (even though the requirement for the address format is shown in the subheader), or even add several addresses.
Fortunately I capture all the Form input in a Power Automate flow and add it to an Excel spreadsheet, so that when there is an error at least the department for whom the form was created can later get back to the user and deal with any open issues, however any approval will fail and cause the Flow to fail, so there needs to be a workaround to deal with a failed flow.
Enabling the user to pick from a people picker field (allowing more than one address too) would greatly improve usability.🙂
