New to Forms -Some Questions

[Steven Taub]

Hi, I'm enjoying working with Microsoft Forms. It's really quite easy to create some high end survey forms.

With that being said, I have a few questions.

• Can any information about the person submitting the survey be embedded as a field in the form?  So far everything comes in as anonymous.
• Any other conditional options other than branching from one question to another? An example would be, if an option is chosen in question 2, then in question 3, 4 of 5 options become available.
• can data be accessed in any other software, other than opening an excel workbook?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

If you export the results to Excel, do you see information about the person who completed the survey, like their e-mail address and/or name? I use Forms at work, so they're always set to the "in my organization" option rather than the "anyone" option. I always can see the name and e-mail address of the respondent if I view results in Excel. If you are using the "available to anyone with link" option, I'm not sure how that works. You could always add a field for Name or e-mail and make it a required question.

Besides Excel, Forms has a Flow connector. I'm doing some pretty impressive things combining Forms and Flow. Flow will allow you to do almost whatever you want with the responses after they're submitted. It's relatively easy to figure out if you want to do something simple, like send yourself an alert and log the results into a SharePoint list whenever a response is completed. If you want to get more complicated, there's a learning curve but it's doable. I'm not sure where you were hoping to export the responses to, but definitely set up a SharePoint list and have them logged into there. Then if you want them somewhere else, add that on after. Trust me, it'll much easier to work with SharePoint lists in Flow than it is to work with any other type of document.

[#3]

Wow Ryan. Thanks very much for your response, they really helped.

Following up on your responses, Everything I'm doing so far is going through Microsoft Teams. Are you referring to SharePoint?  On the team site I didn't see any options for Flow.

1) With SharePoint lists, can you set up a list as a survey form similar to the way it's done in Microsoft forms? Is there flexibility in design, etc.

2) Are there any good examples out there that are similar to the way that you describe, in your response, using flow and forms within SharePoint?

[#4]

Hi Steven. Go to Office.com. If you're not automatically logged in, use whatever login credentials you use for Microsoft Teams. You'll see this.

On your form, try changing this option.  If you can make it so that everyone filling out the form has to be logged into a Microsoft service, it should capture their e-mails. For me, their names also show up when I export to Excel from the Forms app, but I can't access their names (only their e-mail address) any other way. Having their e-mail is good enough. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to track their domain or the URL they used to reach the form, which is what I was hoping to figure out when I found your post today (still no luck, unfortunately).

I don't like the surveys you can build in SharePoint. They have some features that Forms doesn't have, but it's not easy to set up, there are no customization options to speak of, and most importantly for me, they don't allow Likert-type questions.

Go to Flow from Office.com and I would start by going to "Learn" and watching some of the videos. There are templates available for a lot of things, but you're probably going to have to customize them for what you want to do. I'm still working on some custom ones right now. They're really complicated and I can't screenshot all of the steps (both practically speaking and because some of it might have sensitive business info) but just to give you an idea, these all these Flows are do things with just one Form survey.

When I say create a SharePoint list, go to any SharePoint site you have or set up a new one. Then "new">>"list". Imagine you're setting up a table in Excel, if Excel were a lot more irritating to use. Once you get the hang of it, you can create calculated columns using basically the same functions you'd use in Excel - the only difference being that anything that updates all the time automatically, like TODAY() is not supported in SharePoint. Also, formulas cannot reference a certain cell like in Excel. You can only reference other columns. It's handy because if you set a Flow to insert a new item, the calculated columns will always work. However, it's difficult to do everything you'd like to do with formulas without being able to use any that automatically update. After a lot of frustration, I found a workaround in the form of basing all date calculations on a column called "Current Date". Then, I created a flow that updates every item on the SharePoint list with today's date. Any calculated columns that reference the "current Date" column will be updated daily, and you'll have a random "Current Date" column that shows today's date all the way down. It woks though.

Hope this helps.

Ryan