MS Forms Questions Looping and Data Field Names

[Lijun_Chen]

Hi Community Members,

I have a question about using Microsoft forms to loop through a set of questions, as well as the field names of the same questions. I would welcome any of your suggestions/advice.

We are using a MS 365 Microsoft Forms survey to collect information about child care providers and their facilities / centers. As a provider can have several facilities, we need to repeat the set of questions for each facility/center. Since looping back to the same questions is not possible with MS Forms, I have used branching to include repeated a section of questions for each facility / center. If a provider answered "yes" to "do you have another facility?", he/she will be directed to the next section with the same questions. If 'no', the survey will end and be submitted. 

We can capture the responses data in an Excel table in Sharepoint project folder. However, since the Forms has repeated questions for different facilities, the table's field headers for the repeated questions are the same, except with an number index 1,2,3, etc. at the end to differentiate the different questions.

One question I have is that: whether I can truncate or rename the field names to make them shorter and easy to recognize. Such as instead of "What is the name of the facility's director? ", rename it as "DirectorName Facility 1 / 2 / 3, etc." 

The 2nd question is whether I can reorder the questions so that the same question for different facilities are put together?

Another question is about using Power Automate for notification once an survey is received / response submitted. Because the Form is created by a colleague in a Group and shared with me (it is in my list of forms and I can edit it), but when I tried to create a Flow based on it, I find the Flow cannot recognize / find the Form ID for the Survey form we are using. I have to copy the ID name (a very long string of numbers ad letters) and paste it in the Form ID field. Is there any reason Why the Power Automate cannot recognize the Form?

The other problem is when I try to use dynamic content of the Form in power Automate, the questions displayed are not in proper order as in the Form. Besides, the repeated questions for different facilities do not have a number suffix 1,2,3 (as in the Excel data) to differentiate them, so I cannot tell which question is for which facility. Is there a way to solve this problem? 

Thanks a lot. 

LC 

[#2]

@Lijun_Chen don't change the column names in the spreadsheet read row as that can break the relationship between the question in the form and the spreadsheet.

In Power Automate, for group forms you always need to use the ID, there is no way round that.

There is no way to re-order the items in the dynamic content box. If we have a long set of questions  we always add 1. 2. 3. etc into the beginning of the question even though that seems counter-intuitive as the questions already have a number, but of course with branching that number can change. So we have a fixed question nunber at the beginning of the question to help identify it.

Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User

[#3]

Hi Rob,
Thanks a lot for your advice. They are very helpful.

[#4]

Hi Bob,
As the current MS Forms I created have been revised a few times, the order of the questions has been mixed up and deleted questions/field names are still in the Excel forms data. I made a copy of the MS Form and in the new data file for the copied Form, all the fields seem to be in order as they appear in the Form survey, and the deleted questions are no longer in the data. Using the copy of the Forms survey seems to be a solution to have a clean slate of the data.

But one question I found is that the new Excel data file from the copied Forms survey is not stored in the same subfolder as the original Forms data, but in the root folder of the Sharepoint project. But When I moved the Excel file to the subfolder, all the numeric fields have all become text fields. It is very frustrating. Do you have any ideas how to deal with this?