Microsoft Forms

Gunjan Yadav
4 min readJul 13, 2021

If you are new to Microsoft Forms or have not yet started using it, here's your chance to get to go through an overview about what is Microsoft forms, who can use it, and what does it provide you with.

Microsoft Forms

Introduction

Microsoft Forms is a powerful web-based application within Microsoft 365, that allows users to create shareable surveys, quizzes, and pools in minutes. Forms track participant responses visually through the dashboard — the dashboard provides a visual representation of the data, providing real-time results and analytics for your survey.

It was released by Microsoft in June 2016.

Use Cases

  1. In education,
  • It can be used to create quizzes.
  • Collect feedback from teachers and parents, or
  • Plan class and staff activities.
  • Assess student progress with quizzes and easily export answers to Excel.
  • Transform a quiz into an educational asset by adding videos to the questions.

2. In Business Organization,

  • It can be used to collect customer feedback
  • You can measure employee satisfaction
  • Product or business can be improved
  • Organize company events and meetings
  • Marketing Surveys (from people outside your organization
  • You can use forms to replace paperwork, eliminate process steps, automate your business

Who can use Microsoft Forms?

Microsoft Forms are free to use for any of the following:

Office 365 Education

  • Office 365 A1 Plus
  • Office 365 A5
  • Office 365 Education E3

Microsoft 365 Apps for business

  • Microsoft 365 Business Basic
  • Microsoft 365 Business Standard
  • Microsoft 365 Business Premium
  • Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise
  • Microsoft 365 Enterprise E1, E3, and E5 plans
  • Existing Office 365 Enterprise E4 customers who purchased E4 before its retirement
  • Microsoft 365 F3
  • Microsoft 365 F5

U.S. Government Community Cloud: GCC and GCC High environments

  • Microsoft 365 GCC and GCC-High G1, G3, and G5

Microsoft personal account

  • Hotmail
  • Live
  • Outlook.com

Features of Microsoft Forms

  1. Personalize your forms

Customize your background image, add a picture to a question, create sections for your server, and more.

2. Share and Collaborate

There are a few different ways to share it:

  • Copy the link, put that link in an email or website. You could text it to someone. There is a QR code. You code grab this code and put it on your website
  • Can give other people the ability to edit it. So it can be accessed by anyone
  • You can treat it like a template and give someone a duplicate

3. Anonymous

4. Accessible

Forms created from Microsoft Forms are accessible and can be completed using a screen reader or by a sighted person on a keyboard. In some cases, a person with a screen reader or keyboard may also be able to edit or create a form.

5. Confidential

Use Microsoft Forms in Teams to work together managing anonymous surveys either share them with authenticated users within your organization, or with anonymous respondents anywhere.

6. Secured

Microsoft Forms is encrypted both at rest and in transit.

7. Free

It is free for anyone with a Microsoft account, with premium features such as an expanded number of respondents and more templates available to Microsoft 365 Personal and Microsoft 365 Family subscribers.

8. Your form is saved automatically while you create it.

9. Simple to use, quick, intuitive, and lightweight application.

Features Provided by Microsoft Forms

  • Add a picture or logo to a form header
  • Change a form theme
  • Add a picture to a question
  • Add a video to a question
  • Print a form
  • Block internet access during a quiz
  • Copy/Delete a form
  • Customize your background image
  • Adding conditional questions or branching
  • Many more…..

Integration with Microsoft 365

The data can be exported to Microsoft Excel.

Microsoft Forms is now integrated with PowerPoint for Office 365 to provide educators an easy solution of inserting a quiz or an assessment into a PowerPoint presentation.

With which web browsers does Microsoft forms work?

Microsoft Forms is optimized for Internet Explorer 11, Edge, Chrome (latest version), Firefox (latest version), Chrome on Android (latest version), and Safari on iOS (latest version).

Platforms supported by web forms

Microsoft Forms runs on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and web platforms.

Advantages of Microsoft Forms

  • Straightforward to use and build
  • Easily create surveys, quizzes, and polls
  • Simple to use
  • Works on any web browser
  • Improve Workflows
  • Saves time
  • It is efficient to use

Limitations of Microsoft Forms

  • Limited to 100 questions.
  • MS Forms has a limit of 100 questions per form (at the time of writing).
  • Users can’t save a form for later or update a submitted response.
  • Choice questions store only 60 options.
  • 4000-character max on textual responses.
  • In ranking questions, you can only have between 2 and 10 options per response.
  • If you have a ranking question with 2 options, you’ll only be able to ask 50 questions. If you have one with 10 options, you’ll only be able to ask 20. This of course relates to your overall 100 question limit.

References

For more such insights about Microsoft Forms, you can visit the following links:

https://forms.microsoft.com

https://support.microsoft.com

https://www.chorus.co

youtube(Prolific Oaktree)

Wikipedia

https://www.techquarters.com/

Researchgate

For more such product info, stay connected.

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