What Can Microsoft Forms Do for Your Business?

Many businesses have found platforms like Survey Monkey quite helpful as a free or low-cost tool to easily build and send to customers, employees, vendors, and anyone from whom information is needed.

These platforms are indeed super helpful, but the tedium of creating an account and navigating the often-cumbersome program to get the final, polished result you want can take more time than you prefer to commit to this task. Then there is still the step of getting the form to the individual or group from whom you still need the response – usually via yet another program or digital vehicle.

What Is Microsoft Forms?

Though the name of the app is misleading, Microsoft Forms is what you’ve been waiting for as a form and survey solution. Part of the Microsoft 365 productivity app suite, Microsoft Forms is an underutilized and overlooked app with lots of features and tons of flexibility for users to design custom Forms.

While Microsoft Forms has been referred to as an online survey creator, this is an oversimplified label for the numerous options users have to design Forms to collect information or data from recipients. With efficiency and innovation, Microsoft Forms allows users to create Forms quickly and easily through its widget that guides users toward the Form that will collect data to deliver the most accurate results.

Are You Ready to Start Using Microsoft Forms?

No downloads or software installations are necessary with Microsoft Forms since users log into the Microsoft Forms homepage with your Microsoft account. If you don’t already have a Microsoft account, you can create a free account pretty easily just for Microsoft Forms.

Log in to your Microsoft account

When you log in, you may see your “Welcome” screen, even if you’re logging in for the very first time. You’ll likely see more Microsoft 365 productivity apps on the left side of your browser window as part of the easy navigation built into Microsoft 365 apps, and your Forms dashboard will already be loaded as your My Forms section.

Create and name your form

Your first step will be to click on the plus sign (+) to create your new Form, the widget will prompt you for a name for your Form in the Questions section. Since this is the Questions widget, you may think this is your first Question, but this is just the starting point and will be the theme of your Form. You can also choose a description to give more information about your Form to those who are drawn to the Form to fill in responses.

Add your questions

Here is where you start getting into the groove. Once your Form is named, you’ll click the button that says “+ Add New” to start adding questions to your Form.

The Form widget will give you lots of choices for your question types, including:

Multiple choice
Text
Rating
Date
Many more options

Preview and test your Form

Before you click “Send”, which is what finalizes your Form and gives you the options for how to deliver your Form to respondents, you can preview your Form to make sure everything lines up with what you were planning. You’ll also want to preview your Form in mobile format since it’s likely some of your recipients will respond via a mobile device.

You’ll also be able to test your Form in preview. So long as you key your responses in preview, the responses won’t be recorded in your “official” responses report.

From this step, if you note that you need to make edits to your Form, you’ll see where you can click “Back” to make edits in the creation step. If you’re finished with your Form and it’s ready, you can click “Send” and the sharing menu will give you options for how to send your Form.

Start Using Microsoft Forms Today

Microsoft Forms lets you:

Create Forms easily
Collect and view real-time responses
Export data quickly
Visualize data using automatic presentations and charts

What Can Microsoft Forms Do for Your Business?