Forum Discussion
Anonymous responses on Office forms: is there any way to have their email or name?
Damien_Rosario obviously there is no way to know who answered anonymously. That is a truism.
The point of the original question is why can't we have attributed answers on a form that allows external conacts to answer.
Data protection and all that - we can't force people to give us their emails. Absolutely right and how it should be.
But we aren't forcing them to answer. They want to answer and they want us to know who the answer is coming from.
They should be able to waive their anonymity and provide us with their email address. Without them having to type their email address in and potentially get it wrong.
Especially when we already have their email address - we sent them the link to the form in an email!!!
They are friendly contacts, volunteers and supporters of the charity, who send us information regularly. But they are not allowed to tell us who they are by providing their email address! What is this maddness?
Hi Guy_Boswell
I disagree that it's a truism that anonymous forms cannot retrieve the submitter, which is why we're still fielding questions about it today.
I vaguely recall there being email address fields and I think custom link options (?) in Microsoft Forms Pro when that was around, though as you may recall it was an additional subscription cost for Pro at the time. Having that option in Microsoft Forms would be useful.
A required text field to capture an email address, whilst not perfect, is a viable option for now. Once in a while, someone may make a typo in their email address, but overall, it's still a reasonable option to exercise for anonymous forms. Coupled with Power Automate workflows, it can be a powerful solution and I believe our tech community has the collective knowledge to assist with individual scenarios.
I'm betting the good folks in the Microsoft Forms team have a backlog of requests to implement, and hopefully, feedback like this will make it into their thought processes and eventually their roadmap!
Cheers and best wishes
Damien