Forum Discussion

Copper Contributor

Nov 15, 2017

Solved

Auto Save issues in MS 365 Forms

Hi, I created 18 questions yesterday for an Office training quiz on MS Forms (online 365) using both IE and Chrome; when opening the Quiz today to continue building the quiz, only 6 of the 18 questio...

microsoft forms

Per Larsson
Nov 27, 2017
In our school it has happened several times that feedback and grades to pupils in Forms has disappeared. The auto saving is a nightmare. It looks as it has saved but when you close and reopens the app your work i gone. PLEASE MS solve this problem!

David Wrigley

Copper Contributor

Mar 21, 2018

I had the same issue - lots of advanced branching and 50+ questions and the whole lot has been lost. I genuinely cannot believe MS have launched this product as ready to go live. In its current state it's just not ready. I had previewed my content which worked perfectly so this leads you to believe it has all saved as expected.

My question choices have been completely muddled between questions and the vast majority have now disappeared altogether. Some choices now have reverted to 'Option 3' and the branching naturally all gone because the questions have gone. What a disappointing waste of time.

Kathy Bartlett

Copper Contributor

Mar 21, 2018

Update: I was talking with my IT person at work and he thinks it is an "ID-refresh" thing that runs in the background; whereas, the Form's page every so often refreshes your login in the background after a given amount of time. For instance, if you are typing out 15 questions, let's say, but you never "refresh" the webpage during any of that time, the background user ID does not refresh; therefore, the page thinks that you are no longer on the system and in being secure, it closes the user ID from saving. Hence, when you log out after a period amount of time without refreshing your page, when you go back into your Form, stuff is missing/gone. I have learned that with each question I add, I do a web page refresh before continuing to enter the next question. It is still a pain, but I have not had to recreate any forms since. Hopefully this is something that MS can fix, as it is still a pain in the rumpus. I mean, I am all for being secure, but at least have a pop-up timer that says you have X-many minutes to push a button to continue (then it auto-refreshes the page to save), or you'll be logged out.

DarekB
Copper Contributor
Oct 27, 2020
Kathy Bartlett
My wife has this problem quite often. She checks a complete form at home and everything looks fine, but when she starts the form at school some of the questions are missing (sometimes most). I suggested her your solution/workaround. I hope it will help. Thank you!
But of course this is only workaround, but the issue needs to be solved in the Forms app, by changing/updating the synchronization algorithm.