Three New Intelligence and Insights Features from Microsoft Forms | April 2021

Microsoft Forms aims to help you make better decisions with data. As we improve Forms’ intelligence service, we support you in not just creating surveys and polls more easily, but also in extracting key insights from data in an understandable way. Read on to learn about three of these improvements: Estimated Time, the Insights button, and Word Clouds.

Automatically Add Estimated Response Time (Design Intelligence)

You may have noticed that while creating your surveys, Forms now provides an estimated response time for longer surveys. Our intelligence service can now predict the approximate time it will take for someone to complete the form, depending on the types and number of questions on the form. You can add this estimated response time (as seen below) in the subtitle of the form, which can help increase the form’s response rates.

Add Estimated Time to Encourage Response Completion

Engage in a New Experience for Forms Data Insights

In the past, after collecting a few dozen responses in your survey, you may have noticed the "Ideas" button appear at the top of the Responses tab of your Forms design page. By clicking on “Ideas,” you would have seen intelligence-based data insights on your responses.

From now on, you might instead see an “Insights” button under a particular question. If the Forms service can provide insights on the responses to that question—which is dependent on the number of responses and the data itself—you will see this “Insights” button. With this change, you can more clearly interpret the insights Forms provides for a specific question.

Click the Insights button to uncover analysis of your responses

As some of you are already familiar, these insights include sentiment analysis on open-response questions, score distribution for ratings questions, and association rule analysis, which notices patterns in responses across multiple choice questions. These insights are presented in easy-to-read data visualizations, which you can pin for quick future reference.

Visualize Open-Text Responses with Word Clouds (Insights)

We are excited to introduce a new intelligence-based data insight type: word clouds for open-text questions in Forms. The key phrases from the response to that question will be extracted and be visualized in a word cloud, offering you a quick view on the top text phrases among the responses.

View open-text responses in word clouds

As seen above, when you click any key phrase in the word cloud, you can find statistics on how many respondents and what percentage of respondents mentioned this phrase in their response.

Click the word cloud to see exact responses

Additional FAQ:

When will this become available?

We will begin roll out of word clouds to open-text questions in regular forms at the end of April. Meanwhile, as Open-Text Polls for Microsoft Teams meetings start rollout at the end of May or early June, word clouds for these polls will become available as well.

Which languages are supported?

Word clouds will support English and Chinese text in our first stage of this work. We will expand to additional languages in the near future—please stay tuned.

Will I always get a word cloud for my open-text questions?

No, not always—this is because the Forms service may not have found any meaningful results to show, especially if you have only received a small number of total responses. You can come back to check for a word cloud after collecting more responses.

Next Steps

We hope you explore these latest updates as they become available to you. If you have additional questions on Forms surveys, quizzes, or polls, please visit our Support page.  To send your feedback, go to the upper right corner of your form design page and select the three dots ... > Feedback. You can also join discussions in the Microsoft Forms Tech Community and follow the Forms Blog to stay updated in the future. Thank you.