Microsoft Forms: The Survey Tool You Already Pay For in Microsoft 365

Most small businesses pay for a survey tool, or put up with emailing a Word document around and copying the answers into a spreadsheet. If you have Microsoft 365, you already have something better for most jobs: Microsoft Forms.

What Microsoft Forms does

Forms is a simple drag-and-drop builder for surveys, quizzes, polls and sign-up forms. People fill them in on any device through a link, with nothing to download. Responses appear in Forms as they arrive, with charts built for you, and you can open them in Excel with one click.

It is included with Microsoft 365 business plans, and you sign in with your normal work account.

Build your first form in five minutes

1. Go to forms.office.com (it now redirects to forms.cloud.microsoft) and sign in with your work account.
2. Select New Form, or pick one of the templates.
3. Select Add new and choose a question type. The basics are Choice, Text, Rating and Date. Under more question types you’ll find Ranking, Likert (agree/disagree scales), File upload and Net Promoter Score.
4. Open Settings to choose who can respond: anyone, or only people in your organisation. You can also choose whether to record names and allow only one response per person.
5. Select Collect responses to share it as a link, a QR code, an email or an embed code for a web page.

When answers come in, open the Responses tab for a summary, or Open in Excel to work with the raw data.

Six ways to use Forms at work

Client feedback

A short satisfaction survey after a matter closes, a year-end or an onboarding. Keep it short: busy clients are much more likely to finish five questions than twenty-five. A Net Promoter Score question gives you one number to track over time.

Staff security quiz

Use New Quiz to test what your team remembers from security awareness training, such as how to spot a phishing email. Quizzes mark the answers for you and can show the correct answer afterwards. It also gives you a simple record that training happened, which is handy for Cyber Essentials and insurer questionnaires.

Internal requests

Holiday requests, equipment requests, IT problems, room bookings: anything that currently arrives as a scattered email can go through a form, so the details you need are always there.

Event sign-ups

Client seminars, training sessions or the office party. Share the link or print the QR code, and you have a list of names and dietary needs in one place.

Change readiness

Before you switch phone system, move to Teams or change how files are stored, ask staff a few questions about how they work now and what worries them. It’s a quick way to find problems before they become complaints.

Quick polls

Need a decision on a date or a choice of options? A one-question form beats a long reply-all email thread.

Tips for better forms

• Start with the decision you want to make. If an answer won’t change anything, leave the question out.
• Use branching. Forms can skip questions that don’t apply based on earlier answers, which keeps forms short.
• Prefer choices to free text. Multiple-choice answers are much easier to count than paragraphs.
• Put team forms in a group. A form belongs to the person who created it. Moving it to a Microsoft 365 group makes everyone in that group an owner, so it doesn’t vanish when someone leaves.

A word on personal data

As soon as a form asks for names, contact details or anything about a person, you are collecting personal data under UK GDPR. That brings duties about what you collect, what you tell people and how long you keep it. We cover those in our companion post, using Microsoft Forms for data collection under UK GDPR.

And never use a form to ask for passwords. Criminals use online forms for phishing for exactly that reason, so your staff and clients should be suspicious of any form that asks.

Getting more from Microsoft 365

Forms is one of many tools that come with Microsoft 365 and go unused. For more ideas, see our seven Microsoft 365 tips. If you’d like help making sure your licences are set up properly and your team knows what’s available, that’s part of our managed IT support.