How best to manage a monthly (recurring) form and results

[jkearley]

Hi everyone,

Each month, following our team meeting i send a survey out to get feedback. The questions are the same, and i leave it open for the same amount of time each month. 

I wanted to know if there is a way of best managing this every month, as at the moment, i'm duplicating the form, and having to use a new form each month. I was hoping perhaps i could export the results, and then somehow clear out all responses and use that same form again? But i'm not sure if i'll lose anything by doing it this way?

I'm also having trouble with being able to save the forms in onedrive, any advise on that would be great. 

Thanks,

Jodie

[#2]

@jkearley I would suggest that you use a flow in Power Automate to save the results of the form into a list in SharePoint. You would only need 1 form for each month but by doing this you can filter the list to get each month's results. Out of the box it won't give you the nice pie charts and graphs that you get with Forms, but later on as your experience grows you can have a view of the list formatted with JSON to get those pie charts etc.

Saving the results of the form into a SharePoint list is not difficult and an example of how it's done is shown in the images below: 

An alternative to SharePoint is to save the form responses into a table in an Excel spreadsheet which would give you more options for charts etc.

Come back with any questions about this.

Rob

Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User

[#3]

Thanks Rob, I think the second suggestion might be more realistic as i'm not familiar with Power Automate, though I'd like to be now you mention it.

I can happily save the individual excel spreadsheets, but you're right i will lose the pie charts etc that are autogenerated. How do i go about stripping the survey back to no responses to reuse it everytime?

Also, did you happen to have a fix for being able to save the forms into specific one drives? I can't even see where they are saved currently....

Thanks, :)

[#4]

Any thoughts @RobElliott?

[#5]

Would still be great to hear back from you RobElliott or from anyone else who can help as i have to use the form again soon. Thanks, Jodie

[#6]

ok .. forms are not saved into one drive .. but the spreadsheet output is and can be.

What I've found is the best way is to create a sheet in the one drive area you want the data set to be in. Then you can from within excel (for Web) attach a form to the spreadsheet. In this way all of the data from the form will go into the file you want. Only one form per workbook though..

Also you can delete the data from within the form .. and leave the data in the sheet. Do delete data form. Go into the form editor and the Responses Tab .. in there you see options to page thru the data and delete the submissions you don't want. Just don;t sync the data back tot he sheet our you may loose data.

an escape hatch here is to copy the old data to a new tab .. so one tab per month.