Forum Discussion
Multiple Choice answers with branching per answer
kirstenmiller I suspect this will never be implemented because the branching would have to take account of every possible combination of checkboxes selected.
Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User
RobElliott that's unfortunate as theres plenty of competitor programs that have that feature.
kirstenmiller I can't even get my brain round the logic of how that would work! Suppose you had 8 choices in your multi-select form, if a user checked 1,3 and 5 where would it branch to? If another user selected 1,6 and 7 where would that branch to? What if a user checked all 8 choices where would that branch to? And so on. With 8 choices there are 40,320 possible branching combinations. I cannot see how Microsoft could possibly implement that in Forms. What are the competitor applications you mentioned that allow this branching from multi-select choices and how do they handle such a large number of potential branches?
Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super UserThey could implement "if answer includes X, do Y" so at most you'd have 8 branches based on your 8 choices. In the 8 example scenario you posed, if the user checked 1,6 and 7 then follow branch 1 to completion, then return and do branch 6 to completion, then do branch 6. At most you'd have to add a "Return" option in the branch logic so it would know where the branch ended.
Apologies for the necropost.
Erik Pitti yes your scenario would work if Microsoft Forms allowed looping back which so far it never has.
Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User.
Principal Consultant, SharePoint and Power Platform WSP Global (and classic 1967 Morris Traveller driver)
RobElliott smartsheet has this feature and it is super helpful. There was a limit to the logics you could create, but I hadn't ever run into that issue.
I am exploring Microsoft Forms after testing a prototype form in Google Forms, which does have branching to different sections based on selection from a multiple choice question. The usefulness of this feature is that, based on selection, you can direct to different sets of ensuing questions. It is also possible to return to a common flow of questions after the specific ones are answered. For data entry on a cell it greatly simplifies and shortens the procedure for the user. Until it is available in Microsoft Forms, I will have to stay with Google forms.
ChrisBack I've compared the two, and Google Forms supports branching on 'Multichoice', but not 'Checkbox' (which allows multiple selections to be made). This is the same as Sharepoint Forms which supports branching on 'Choice', but not when 'Multiple selections' is enabled for it.
So there's no difference in behaviour between Google Forms and Sharepoint Forms on this matter.
