Notes from the field: Microsoft Forms

As you may or may not have seen over the past week or so, Microsoft Forms is now in the process of being rolled out to us all!!

Forms can now be associated to a user as it is included within the Office 365 E3 license.

Once you have assigned the license you can then also set some basic options, deciding whether to allow external sharing of the forms. This is done by choosing “Settings”, then “Services & add-ins” and then “Microsoft Forms” from within the Admin Center.

You simply then select whether to allow collaboration and responses with external people. Bear in mind this is enabled by default, so if you are not using External sharing for your organization you may need to disable this.

Once this is all set, you can then either click the new “Forms” tile on the navigation available from the waffle menu.

You can also just browse to https://forms.office.com or https://forms.microsoft.com to access the web console.

To create a new form, simply click the “New Form” button and add the questions you need. When adding the question, you get to pick from the four options of control types.

Selecting the “Choice” option, allows you to add the question and the various answers.

There are a few options available for each question, allowing you to set the “Allow multiple answers”, set if it is “required”.

Media can also be added on each option, by simply just pressing the icon for media next to various location on the form.

You can then select media locally and upload or pick something from Bing images.

Once the form is created as you need, then press the “Preview” button to see how it will be displayed.

Notice you can also view it one a computer or a mobile device. If you are happy you can then apply a theme, by selecting the “Theme” option and choosing a pre-built on or choosing an image you wish to display for the background.
Now you have the form you need, simply press the “Share” button and choose how you wish to share the form. First, you need to set who can respond to the form.

Next you can select one of four ways to share: Link, QR Code, Embed and Email.

Of course, none of this would be helpful if you could not see the responses. Clicking back in the forms site, selecting the form, and then clicking the “Responses” tab will display your answers.

As you can see is very easy and simply to create forms. I personally have great expectations for this and hope more features get added soon.