To find the app, open your Office 365 Home Page and look at your list of apps. If Forms isn’t showing, click ‘Explore all your apps’ and you’ll find it listed in there.
Creating a Form
Right, let’s run through the basics of creating a form. Inside the app, you’ll be presented with the Forms home page. As you can see, you can choose to create a new form or quiz.
When you select a new form, you can simply input the form details and add an image.
You can easily add questions of a variety of question types to your survey.
The ‘Choice’ option allows you to add multiple-choice questions and as many potential answers as you wish to include. You can also determine whether the respondent can provide multiple answers and whether completing the question is mandatory by toggling the ‘multiple answers’ and ‘required’ functions on/off. You can also add an image if it gives context to the question – see example below.
It’s easy to simply add more and more questions to your form as you go on.
With the ‘text’ option, your respondents can answer your question with a free-text response - they can write whatever they like in the text box.
Date-related questions present the option to select a date from a calendar in response to a question, while ‘rating’ questions allow you to rate something using a scale of numbers or stars.
After adding your questions, you can easily change the appearance of your form by adding a ‘theme’. You can simply pick from the different colours and graphics options, before using the ‘preview’ button to see what the final survey will look like to your respondents.
Sharing your Form
Sharing your survey is so simple with Microsoft Forms. You can choose whether the survey is only shareable to people within your organisation or just anyone that gets hold of the link. You can also share survey templates and collaborate on survey design.
By copying the link, you can paste it anywhere e.g. in an email, on a webpage or social media – the possibilities are endless! Alternatively, you can generate a QR code – which requires someone to scan the code using their mobile device to access the form.
The other two options include ‘Embed’ and ‘Email’. The embed option provides some HTML code which you can paste in a webpage, while ‘email’ is exactly what it says on the tin.
Responses and Results
Once you’ve shared your new survey, you will likely want to review the responses. In your survey ‘responses’ tab, you will find a dashboard with analytics of the data submitted by your survey respondents.
As you can see, you can quickly find out how many people have submitted responses, the average time it takes a respondent to complete the form and the status of the form. Following this, you can see an overview of the answers for each of your survey’s questions. For a multiple-choice question, you will see the number of responses for each option and a pie chart.
Luckily, it seems that including a cat meme in my Chorus blog wasn’t inappropriate after all – everyone loves cats, right?
For any question type, you can see a full breakdown of all the different answers. Note how each respondent is provided with an ID. This allows you to cross-compare answers between different questions. If you share your survey with people inside your organisation, you can select the option to capture their names – otherwise the data is anonymised.
As you can see, 4/5 respondents chose Chorus as their favourite UK-based Managed IT Services Provider! I’d love to say that there wasn’t any bias here – but there was.
With ‘rating’ questions, the overview shows you the average rating from all of the responses.
Finally, you can open the data in an Excel spreadsheet in case you want to do more detailed statistical analysis – or you could even put the data into Power BI.