- September 26, 2018
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- 4 min
Chances are that if your business uses Microsoft Office 365, you also have access to Forms and Teams. Microsoft Forms is an online form and quiz builder that can be used to collect information from both your organization and external users. Teams is Microsoft’s chat and collaboration platform, and in many cases is an ideal way to make forms available to staff.
Creating a form
Let’s create an example form that we’ll integrate with a channel in Teams. While there are many applications for a form within a business, we’ll keep things lite and create an “Office Lunch Ideas” form.
First, open a Web browser and navigate to https://forms.office.com/. If you are already logged in to Office365, you’ll see a page where any of your existing forms will be displayed. If you aren’t yet logged in, you’ll be asked to do so and then be redirected to the appropriate page:
From here, you can create a new form. There are two choices in form types, standard forms and quizzes. Let’s create a new standard form by clicking the “New Form” button:
Be sure to choose an appropriate title and description for your form so its purpose is clear, and then begin adding questions that are relevant to the information you are looking for. In the case of my demo form, I’m asking what staff would like to eat and drink at our next office lunch:
Microsoft Forms provides a variety of controls to help you best ask questions in a way that will provide you with responses that can be measured as you see fit.
With our form built, we can preview what it’ll look like to Valiant’s staff:
It’s a bit boring, but Forms includes themes and the ability to add an image to spice things up!
You can select a theme for your form by clicking on the “Theme” link at the top of the page and adding an image is as easy as clicking the image icon to the right of the form title. You can upload an image of your own or search Bing to easily find an image that works with your form.
Connecting your form to Teams
With the form built, we are ready to share it among Valiant’s staff and begin collecting responses. Microsoft Forms can be shared a number of ways:
- Standard URL
- QR Code
- Embedded on a page as an iFrame
While this form could be sent out via an email, we use Teams heavily throughout the day and will receive a larger response by placing in a frequently trafficked area.
Adding a Microsoft Form to a channel in Teams is surprisingly simple. First, open Teams and navigate to the channel you want to add the form to. Click on the plus icon at just above the chat area and a pop-up window will appear with different types of tabs that can be added. Locate and click “Forms”:
A new window will appear. Select “Add an existing form” and locate the newly created form in the drop-down menu:
You also have the option of collecting the responses or making them available for everyone to view. For the purpose of this demo I’m going to collect the responses so we can review them later.
Your Microsoft Form is now integrated with your selected channel in Teams and has been added as a tab just above the chat area:
You can click on the tab to edit the name displayed – I’ve gone ahead and renamed it to “Office Lunch Ideas” and performed a test submission:
With our form integrated with teams and a test submission made, let’s return to Microsoft Forms and click on our form’s “Responses” tab:
The responses tab provides quite a bit of information on form activity. It displays the number of responses, the average time it takes to complete the form, the form’s current status, and lists all responses. You also have the ability to export the responses to an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.
Forms is of Office365’s lesser known tools, and when used correctly can provide you with a wealth of insight to base decisions on. Its ease of integration with Microsoft Teams makes collecting internal information easy and fits in to the collaborative nature of the platform effortlessly. Interested in learning more about Microsoft Teams? Download our Microsoft Teams Power User Guide and Cheat Sheets today!
