The Microsoft Forms service became available as a preview test release this month for commercial Office 365 users.
The service is already being used by Microsoft’s Office 365 Education customers to create surveys and quizzes. However, now Office 365 business customers that have opted to get “first release” Office 365 builds across the whole tenancy will start seeing a Microsoft Forms preview that’s designed for business use. The Marketing team at Pinnacle is starting using it today, and they have a ball using the Microsoft Flow options with it!
Organizations can use Microsoft Forms to create basic surveys for internal use with employees or surveys for external use with customers. The surveys are accessible in any browser and scale to work on mobile devices. The response data get displayed in automatically generated charts, which pull the data together in “real time.” Microsoft Forms users can see the graphed data from the Responses tab on the Microsoft Forms page, which is where they create the surveys. Users can access that site with their work or school Office 365 credentials.
While Microsoft Forms are basic, they can be used in various ways. They can be embedded in a Sway or in a OneDrive for Business page. They can be inserted into OneNote Online or Excel Online pages. Microsoft describes those possibilities in this support article.
Currently, it’s made for small scale uses – the response data limit is 5,000. So one would have to export the responses into an application and clear them from the survey or quiz page to get more data. A little bit of a pain, but I’m sure that’ll be a thing of the past after the preview.
The limitations to the structure are quite basic as well, and the conditional logic isn’t integrated just yet – but again – it’s just a preview, so I’ll give them a break. So far I’m liking it. It’s a great alternative to Google Forms, another product when you subscribe to the GSuite