Five new Microsoft Forms features for Education | July 2021
Published Jul 15 2021 10:13 AM 18.2K Views
Microsoft

Whether the school year has just ended or just begun for you, Microsoft Forms has been rolling out features for the classroom. We placed a special focus on our teachers and students when developing these features; however, company employees can also leverage them for the workplace to collect input and engage colleagues. Read on to learn about five of our latest updates for educators.

 

Launched Features

 

Launch Multiple Choice Quizzes in Microsoft Teams meetings

Powered by Forms Polls in Teams meetings, Multiple Choice Quizzes in Teams Meetings are now 100% available. To engage your students during class, you can use this feature to create knowledge check questions or run a trivia game. As students take the quiz, you get real-time insights to help you adjust instruction and support individual students.

 

Multiple Choice Quiz in Teams MeetingsMultiple Choice Quiz in Teams Meetings

 

With this feature, you can choose to keep the identities of poll respondents anonymous. Whether you choose to keep respondents anonymous or not, you can export poll results directly to Excel from Teams. You can also view results (individually and overall in a data visualization) by finding your poll on your Microsoft Forms page under “All My Forms.”

 

Create and edit a quiz directly from a Microsoft Teams assignment

We’ve streamlined the experience of creating, editing, and assigning quizzes in Teams. Now, you can create your entire quiz without leaving Teams—there’s no need to open in a new window or tab on your browser. Later, if you needed to make an edit to your quiz, you can also do so directly from Teams Assignments.

 

Forms in Teams AssignmentsForms in Teams Assignments

 

Analyze responses with word clouds

We are excited to share that you can now leverage a new kind of insight in Forms: word clouds for open-text questions. While on your Responses page, you can find word clouds under the Insights button for an open-text question. With word clouds, you can get a quick understanding of phrases commonly mentioned by your colleagues, your students, or their parents in their text responses. Easily share the word cloud by grabbing a screenshot to add to your email or presentation.

 

Word CloudsWord Clouds

 

To dig deeper, you can click into the word cloud to find statistics on the frequency of these phrases. Learn more about word clouds in this support page or this previous blog.

 

 

Features Rolling Out Soon

 

Try rich text formatting in Forms

Earlier this year, you received the capability to bold, italicize, or underline words in Forms. Starting next week, you can also change font size and font color, as well as use bulleting or numbering, in your forms. This enables you to emphasize certain phrases in your questions, answer choices, titles, and descriptions.

 

Rich Text Formatting in FormsRich Text Formatting in Forms

 

Simply highlight your text to format via the floating tool bar. These additional text formatting features will become generally available for our business and education customers next week and will begin rollout to our government cloud customers by the end of this month (read this blog on updates for our government customers).

 

Send and share your forms more smoothly

Starting in mid-August, you will notice that the top right corner of your Forms design page has been updated for a clearer experience.

 

Melinda_Hu_0-1626284259084.png

 

Under the Send button, you’ll find the options to send your form via URL, QR code, and more, and define which audiences can respond to your form. Please know that clicking the Send button does not automatically send the form to anyone.

 

Under the people icon next to the “Send” button, you can share edit access to the form with fellow educators or colleagues who are co-authoring (co-creating) or evaluating the form with you.

 

Resources

We hope you explore and use these latest updates. If you have additional questions on Forms surveys, quizzes, or polls, please visit our Support page

 

Feedback

We want to hear from you! To send your feedback, go to the upper right corner of your form design page and select the three dots ... > Feedback. Thank you.

 

14 Comments
Bronze Contributor

Excited to promote word clouds! Many thanks, Forms team! :clapping_hands::folded_hands:

Copper Contributor

Please please please can we have folders? At the end of our academic year I have over 200 forms and have to organise them as links in Teams or a Sway… 

Every other quiz or assessment tool we use has folders

Thanks for all the development work

Microsoft

@mattpollitt Hi, you can check the Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365 to see when roll out for Form organization begins. It is in development.

Brass Contributor

I'm a fan of the Word Cloud.  Could it be updated in real-time? 

So, as new responses are received, it's added to the Word Cloud as well as the summary.Example of Word Cloud insights delayed update.png

@Melinda_Hu @Mike Tholfsen 

I appreciate the utility of MS Forms for education customers, but some of these features such as Word Cloud and the improved text formatting features aren't exclusive to EDU licenses. As such, please be sure to post/blog about features that work for general use.

 

In other words, if I'm a corporate customer and I see a notice about new features for Education I might skip reading. But it contains useful info for all customers, not just education.

Copper Contributor

(1) Can one create a poll quiz with two separate questions- one a text field entry and the other both text fields and the other multiple choice question. I need to capture the student ID in the Excel file for uploading later to Blackboard grade book  

(2) can an image file be included?

(3) Can mathematics (Greek symbols) be used? 

Copper Contributor

To clarify - I wish to show only the percentages of correct responses in a poll quiz, without identifying the respondent. Is this the default? Where is this choice made?

Iron Contributor

@GolferSugarwood , 
(1) I don't know on this one; I think a Likert question is the closest you can get to having a multi-question type currently, but that may be different for EDU.

(2) https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-a-picture-to-a-question-72ffc881-c22e-4069-8468-400d1...
(3) https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/education-blog/create-a-math-quiz-in-microsoft-forms/ba-p/202...  (this is from 2018, though, don't know if it is still relevant.  If not, I have used the character map to copy/paste symbols into Forms).

Copper Contributor

We have created course evaluations using MS Forms. We use the Likert scale as well as short answer.  This information is shared with our instructors.  Is there a way to print out the summary and capture all of the short answer responses without exporting to Excel and reformatting the to just show the short answer questions.  Seems like there should be a way to print the summary and capture everything that is part of the form.

Iron Contributor

@kbryant, in the ellipses on the response tab, there's a Get Summary Link, & a Print Summary:

Star_D_0-1629821425821.png


You could print it to PDF and then use Adobe to edit it to only show the latest short answers.

Copper Contributor

Hi, 

I love how easy this form is to use, create, and share. My recommendation is to make the created form (quiz, questionnaire, survey) to be answered more than once by the same individual. 

For example, I use this as a survey for accountability of my time and a student's time. I can not send them the same survey link to fill out because they receive a message stating their "response has already been submitted." I have to create an entirely new form with a new link and this is time-consuming. Google docs has this option, but my school has requested I use Microsoft OneDrive and I didn't realize how beneficial this feature is to creating and using my survey. 

Copper Contributor

Hello! I am new to the group and have been successful in designing three surveys in Microsoft Forms. I would like to have the forms in a Word document  or PDF so I can share the document with my faculty so that we can do edits and updates and it is easier for them to see the total survey in a word or PDF document. How to I convert a form into a PDF or word document? 

Copper Contributor

Hello,

Are there plans for a new feature to allow choice options to pull data from a SharePoint list or MS List? It would be a lifesaver to not have to update Independent Study forms every quarter, when our faculty roster changes

Copper Contributor

MS Forms API: I need to create forms programmatically. is it on the roadmap? Thank you!

Co-Authors
Version history
Last update:
‎Aug 03 2023 03:45 PM
Updated by: