What Is Microsoft Forms and How Can It Help Your Business?

What Is Microsoft Forms and How Can It Help Your Business?

Not all good applications need to come with a lot of bells and whistles to be effective. Sometimes, those that are the most productive are the apps that are simple and just do one thing extremely well.

This is the case with Microsoft Forms, a forms creation and tracking app that is included in Microsoft 365. The application makes it easy to create and share a form, quiz, or poll in just minutes and integrates natively with other Microsoft applications (Teams, Excel, SharePoint, etc.).

When it comes to collaborative platforms, Microsoft 365 is one of the biggest, with over 57,500 companies in Australia using the cloud service. One of the reasons for its popularity is that it keeps expanding to allow businesses to do more.

Microsoft Forms is one of the valuable additions to the platform that is often unused by Sydney businesses simply because they don’t realise they have a form-making tool or how to use it.

We’ll go through the basics of the tool below and give you ideas on where it can benefit your company.

Microsoft Forms Basics

Forms is designed as an easy way to create powerful surveys, quizzes, polls, and other types of forms in just a few minutes.

The basic steps of the process include:

  1. Create form
  2. Share form
  3. View form results in real time
  4. Capture and analyse feedback

How to Access Microsoft Forms

You can access Microsoft Forms by signing into your Microsoft 365 account and visiting the Forms home page.

Three other ways to access Forms are:

  • OneDrive for Business
  • Excel Online
  • OneNote Online

Types of Forms You Can Create

You can create forms from scratch or use one of the Microsoft Forms templates.

Microsoft Forms

You start by choosing a New Form or New Quiz.

Choose the format of your question, you can choose multiple formats in a single form.

  • Multiple-choice
  • Text question
  • Rating
  • Date
  • Ranking
  • Likert (a scale that measures how people feel about something)
  • Net Promoter Score® (how likely are you to recommend…)

Then add the question(s) you want answered and choose whether the question is required or not.

Design Elements

Use can make your form more interesting by using one of the pre-built themes to add color and images to the background.

You can also upload your own image, such as a company logo, to use as the background for your form.

Share Your Form

Once your form is created, you have several ways to share it:

  • Send link: You can copy the link and send that to others via email or messaging.
  • QR Code: Select the QR button in the app to view a QR code for your form that you can download and share.
  • Embed in Webpage: You can embed your form on your website.
  • Invite by Email: Using the Email button to email a form invitation directly from Microsoft Forms.

Reviewing Analytics

Within each form you create you can view the responses in real time. You can see the average time to complete the form/quiz/survey and read each response in detail.

You can click to download the response data in Excel as well to make it easier to review.

Ways That Your Sydney Business Can Use Microsoft Forms

Customer Satisfaction Survey

Instead of sending Word documents or paper forms out annually to gauge customer satisfaction, use Microsoft Forms to make it much easier. The pre-built question types make it simple to put together and share this type survey in just minutes.

Employee Cybersecurity Quiz

As part of your cybersecurity awareness training, you can send a quiz to employees regularly asking them about data privacy policies, ways to identify a phishing attack, etc.

The multiple-choice format makes it easy to put together these types of quizzes and then keep track of how employees are progressing in their cybersecurity proficiency.

Assess Current Cloud Tools

Paid cloud apps can build up quickly in an organisation and lead to redundancy and waste. In 2019, SaaS (Software as a Service) waste nearly doubled from the year prior.

As part of ongoing efforts to improve productivity and lower costs, businesses should regularly evaluate the cloud tools they use.

This can be done by asking employees to rate the cloud software they use and how they use it. Creating a Forms survey can make this easy to do and you can bring all the responses into Excel and chart the popularity of each of your business apps to help in streamlining.

Evaluating Change Readiness

Companies go through change these days on a regular basis. This includes transitioning to new tools and processes as well as adding a product or service. To help guide an organisation through a change, change management is typically used.

One of the processes in change management is understanding how ready the employees in an organisation are for the change. You can help to gauge change readiness by using a Forms survey to ask questions about current capacity to learn a new process, past experience with change initiatives, etc.

Unlock the Full Potential of Your Microsoft 365 Subscription

Are you taking full advantage of the productivity tools in Microsoft 365? GKM2 can help customise solutions that fit your workflows and lower costs while improving efficiency.

Contact us today for a free consultation. Call +61 2 9161 7171 or reach out online.