Using a Form for technicians to check equipment - Know the basics but need some advice

[Polskavitch98]

Hello Everyone,

I am a technician at a university and as it is summertime we have some spare time to go around checking teaching spaces and making sure rooms/equipment are in order and making note of faults to repair before term starts again.

In the past each campus did this in it's own way, some on paper, others using a digital form and basically I have been tasked with finding a way to create a simple 'Room Checker' form that can be accessed from one place across our 5 campuses but the data be available to all technicians and supervisors as neccessary.

Last year I worked on creating a centralised Sharepoint site for all campuses and as MS Teams integrates really nicely with Sharepoint I have built a test form which is available on our AV Home Sharepoint site currently. In trying to update my test form I came across some new questions and wondered if someone here could give me some advice?

- I know that I can download the data from my Form at any time and then filter it inside Excel, so if responses come in from all 5 campuses, I can streamline what I see but as each campus has at least 150 rooms and several technicians could be doing checks at the same time, I was wondering if there was a way to have a room checklist somehow?

At the moment the only way to check which rooms have been done is to filter the data and read through the results and then make a note of which rooms are still outstanding. Can I create a rule or do something specific that would allow me to have conditional formatting or a checklist?

I am not sure how exactly to word my question but the technician could maybe select a room from a drop down list but when a room had been completed it was removed from that list?

Sorry if I waffled, I have a bit of experience creating basic Forms so far but I am unsure if what I need it to do can actually be created within the app so I thought I would ask before I waste any more time on it.

Thanks for your time

PJ H

[#2]

@Polskavitch98 dropdowns are static, as is everything else in Forms, so there is no way for a technician to select a room and then next time it has been removed from the dropdown. For something like that you would need to use Power Apps instead of Forms.

Your idea of having a central SharePoint site is exactly the right approach to take. But you will need a flow in Power Automate to grab each submitted form and save the answers into the SharePoint list. That list can then of course be filtered by the campus and/or other criteria like room type.

But I do think this is a scenario that lends itself very well to Power Apps and it's how I would do it. The SharePoint list mentioned above would be the data source. The technician could call up the room unless a record had already been saved for this room because then it could be omitted from the collection that populates the dropdown. If it's available they could complete the dropdowns, toggles or other fields, add photos etc.

But really none of this is do-able with Forms which is a very simple product which has no logic embedded in it other than branching.

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

[#3]

@Polskavitch98 Are you familiar with "Forms for Excel", via one-drive? It's a great way to get live data in EXCEL from the MS Form you create. You can then create formulas and conditions to get whatever info you need (assuming you are familiar with EXCEL formulas or have access to AI to help you) Here's a decent short video explaining it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbvjYjZyQBY