Multiple Choice answers with branching per answer

[BeckyLC]

Hello,  I am new to the MS Forms platform but so far find it to be user friendly.  The challenge I am having now thought is determining if the system allows for branching per answer when the question is multiple choice?  In the multiple choice question below, I would like to be able to indicate if the person selects "None" then they automatically move to the next question otherwise they can select multiple answers.  Is there a way to do this within Forms?

Thank you for your guidance.

[#2]

@KumarHari007 we are needing to do the same thing.

[#3]

@Karen2021 in all the posts mentioning other platforms no-one has answered the problem of how they or Microsoft could possibly implement branching on multiple select options in a question. With 8 choices there are 40,320 possible branching combinations. I just don't think there is any way Forms will ever offer this level of complexity.

Rob
Los Gallardos
Intranet, SharePoint and Power Platform Manager (and classic 1967 Morris Traveller driver)

[#4]

@RobElliott That's true, it can't be done with conditional branching on multiple select questions. In my response on June 23rd I said much the same thing and suggested a practical alternative would be conditional questions. e.g. Show question 4 if the respondent ticked 2a,2b, but not 2d. Multiple questions can show conditionally based upon the responses to a single multiple choice. This approach can extend further to make questions conditional upon responses to multiple preceding questions too.

[#5]

what if, instead of all possible permutations, the presence of a check on any of the multi-selects could show an additional follow up question. By implementing it this way, each option of the multi-choice question could be treated as an atomic interaction; the only permutations at that point are on and off. It would be easier for the user to complete than separating out each response into a separate question. The case I'm trying to solve for is a form responded identifying which role(s) they play in a system. Any individual may play multiple roles. With some of the roles I want to collect additional data which would be nonsensical to other of the roles.

[#6]

I think people are hung up on the skip function and all its permutations. What is really needed here is  way to hide questions. If you select one or more of the answers, activate / unhide any related question (or section if you need more than one question). If it has to be tied to skipping logic, then select it on the specific question - if answer X is not selected in question Y then skip me. Note this is more than the original question. Way I read they just wanted one of the options to be selector for the choice. A built in "None of the above" answers (like the "Other" option) would work for that. Still with little logic a question/section could be skipped based on another question's answer.

[#7]

No it wouldn't. What I would want is for it to be based on the usual market research options of any (ie at least one), all, or none of the selected items (it could get fancy and allow between N and X of the selected items if more than two are selected; wider still, include an option for only these and no others, but those are more complex). One simply ticks a number of boxes, makes the choice of any/all/none, and the routing is based on that being true or false. Can that be done?

[#8]

@ChrisLangfield , but isn't that human logic? Computers don't think like people.
For a program, doesn't every permutation have to be iterated on the back-end for that routing to take place?

***DISCLAIMER: I am not a programmer***

[#9]

@Star_D yes that sounds about right to me 

Rob
Los Gallardos
Intranet, SharePoint and Power Platform Manager (and classic 1967 Morris Traveller driver)

[#10]

@RobElliott Well, I am a programmer, and I'm used to filtering multiple-choice questions in market research software on the number of boxes that have been ticked. Easy example: build a string of the answers such as ,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, - then check if it contains ,1, or ,2, or ,3, with something simple like find(string,",1,")  > 0. I don't know what the underlying language can handle, but things like SQL will cope quite easily. It doesn't have to equal, just contain. I'm concerned that the responses are showing a lack of ambition here. By the way - it should also be possible to make "None" an exclusive answer so that it cannot be ticked if any other answers are ticked, which is fairly basic survey stuff.

[#11]

@ChrisLangfield Agree. My previous replies on this thread suggest having the option of making questions conditional upon previous responses, including multiple select responses, which is what I think you are suggesting too.

There's no scripting language exposed for the form creator to use, and I don't think that would be appropriate for the target audience for MS Forms. However, in other products (e.g. modern SharePoint conditional column formatting) Microsoft have proved themselves eminently capable of embedding ui-based expression builders into their products - so this is very do-able.

* I was first employed as a professional programmer 37 years ago

[#12]

@Simon_P735 I've also recently been shown Typeform - which has a Logic section in which it is very simple to add responses with OR /AND logic, eg if Q1 has Saturday OR Q1 has Sunday then Jump To Qweekend, and so on. There are many ways behind the scenes to implement this - bitlists (ie 1011001), dictionaries, arrays and so on - which they really need if they want people to use the software for anything more than very basic questions. Perhaps they wish to keep the audience limited, so they don't clutter up their cloud with too much data, I don't know; but anyone who has a branching and a multi-answer facility in their software really should contemplate how combinations of answer can best be handled.

[#13]

@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. 

[#14]

Sorry to reopen an old thread, but this isn't really that complicated if you think of the feature as show/hide as opposed to creating individual branches that need to be pre-coded. If option 1 is selected, show subsequent section 1. If option 1 is not selected, do not show section 1. "Rinse and repeat." Final output table has all sections, but blank responses (or even a non-shown code?) for non-shown questions. This is how other platforms handle this.

[#15]

We currently use Nintex forms and Nintex, for all its faults, has an entire Rules section you can apply to each form. The rules allow you to write out the If/Then statements someone else suggested and I would LOVE for Microsoft to implement something similar within Forms.

[#16]

@RobElliott 

They 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.

[#17]

@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)