Microsoft Forms: 3 new features to boost your forms experience

in this video I'm going to dig into three of the latest updates to the forms experience in Microsoft 365 giving all users with an M365 license access to powerful new features to help you capture information whether it's from colleagues or from your customers forms is one of those hidden apps inside Microsoft 365 that many do not know about but for those users who do it's a Difference Maker to productivity so come with me on a journey of three recently released these features you can start using today to boost your form's experience as always the screen recordings I'm showing you a demos and don't use anyone's private information but before we dive in a quick introduction my name is Nick dorsi I'm the owner of bright ideas agency a digital transformation consulting company focused on the needs of small and mediumsized businesses I share information here to help you navigate the artificial intelligence age with a particular Focus on Microsoft 365 and co-pilot if you enjoy what you see here then it would be great if you'd give the video a like to help it get in front of more people and please subscribe to the channel if you want to keep up to speed on topics such as this before we start looking at new features if you've not used forms before you might be wondering what it is and where do you get started forms is essentially what the name suggests a tool for creating forms you can use for different types of information capture such as customer surveys these are online forms that you can send as a link in an email or put on a website as well as special features such as quizzes for courses or education situations or even adding a form to Virtual presentations to access forms you can head over to office.com and use the waffle button to see all your apps and then select forms here you're presented with easy access to all your forms including those you created personally and those you have access to from groups forms has a pretty useful and well-presented view to help you understand the results you are getting from collecting data but often your purposes in collecting requires something more specific than this to extract the insights you need and for a long time this has been a little problematic you've been able to download a point in time Excel file of results or use tools like power automate to save the data collected with each form response somewhere else but just having an easy way to have a more basic presentation outside of forms that gives you all your data has not been straightforward but now Microsoft has added a new feature that does just that once you've started collecting your data you can jump over to the responses as normal and while you can still download a copy of the data as an Excel file the default option is to open the results in Excel which creates a synced workbook in your one drive you could then go ahead and share that workbook with others and they will see forms results as they come in no need to deal with your forms data in forms if you jump into a form you've already connected to a workbook you can also disconnect it or connect it to a new one however there are limitations here you can't choose where that workbook will be it's always going to be in your one drive so depending on your specific need and while you're collecting data this might be a great solution for you or you might still be better suited thinking of power automate with Microsoft lists as a place to capture your forms responses on that note just wait for update three later in the video that might offer a different solution to that problem personally I think this feature probably makes most sense when you are purely using forms for capturing information like a feedback survey where your action on the data is to do with statistical understanding of the result primarily in situations where you're using forms to capture information that is part of a process Excel is not a good platform for that type of data despite it being the example Microsoft gives in its release notes for this feature I think it is now generally agreed by most people with expertise in Microsoft 365 apps that for maintaining structured data in support of an ongoing process rather than data analysis lists is a far more appropriate data Source than Excel if you have a co-pilot for Microsoft 365 license assigned to your account and you open up a new form in forms you will now see a completely new dialogue you get a draft with co-pilot option bear in mind that despite forms being a product that is also offered for personal plans right now a co-pilot Pro license doesn't give you a similar experience the purpose of this is to help you build your forms you could tell co-pilot what type of form you're looking for or what you're trying to find out and it'll help you get the right questions if you're not sure how to use this a few example prompts are added I'm going to use this one to demonstrate the product create an employee feedback survey for the HR department to assess employes job satisfaction and find areas for improvement including questions about personal information for example Department job role and age feedback on career development company leadership and compensation benefits and recommendations for future Improvement you can see that quickly we get a draft survey with a range of questions across a range of types like with most similar co-pilot interfaces we get the option to keep what's been created to regenerate to discard or to improve or iterate on our prompt you can only manually edit the questions if you decide to click keep it and from there you can edit or discard on an individual question basis I am certainly not someone with a lot of market research or data collection expertise but I've been in enough meeting rooms where these sorts of topics are being discussed in my career to immediately see both some positives and negatives to this feature in a broad sense if you're just starting from a blank survey and want to put together something quick to capture some information then this can give you a great start for more informal scenarios where this isn't the core of your job or it's something you do frequently this is probably really helpful but the reality is that collecting good data that is actionable for your intended purpose is both an art and a science that transcends just putting questions on a page and while I understand that this is creating well- worded and well formatted questions I'm not sure if the technology is considering the form in a holistic way to ensure it's likely to be well responded to by your respondents to allow you to capture the right insights my immediate thought is one of the key issues with most surveys is trying to make them as short as possible while getting everything you need and co-pilot informs seems rather long- winded by default while this feature is a starting point I think there's lots of opportunity here first it's impossible to reference a file in the form creation dialogue imagine if you could reference an event plan or a product overview or even the notes of a meeting where you've discussed the form you want to create I also think the opportunity for dialogue would be useful here with co-pilot maybe asking how are you intending to use the information or what decisions do you need to make to act more like an expert in this Arena rather than just a form drafting tool what do you think of this new co-pilot let me know in the comments co-piloting forms might be straightforward to use but getting started with adopting AI can be a challenge there's a lot to understand about how this technology Works how to use it safely and how to keep your team engaged this is why I put together my new on demand video Course fly into the age of co-pilots aimed at leaders in small and medium-sized businesses this is an overview of that AI adoption Journey it contains over an hour of original video material and best of all for a limited introductory period it's completely free so use the link below to get signed [Music] up this next feature isn't strictly a part of forms it's actually a part of another tool called Microsoft lists but this new capability actually dovetails pretty nicely with how you might currently use forms to open up a new set of possibilities to enhance your workflow earlier in the video I highlighted the ability of forms to sync its data with Excel and while this is a good Advance many of us who advocate for the value of different Microsoft 365 tools would caution that Excel isn't really a great place to keep a lot of data like this particularly if you're capturing data you want to action as part of an ongoing process rather than just capturing it for numerical analysis Excel has a lot of downsides and the better solution is Microsoft list lists is built upon SharePoint lists and it's really good at holding data in a structured way it's not designed for complex numerical analysis like Excel is but to maintain data in an ordered way where lots of people need to use it think of excel as great for calculating metrics based on collected survey data but lists as better for letting people collaborate on data collected for purposes like issue tracking or social media scheduling the addition of forms to lists rounds out a circle on this tool to meet the needs of certain use cases take for example an issue tracker if I head over to office.com and open the lists app Microsoft has already got a really useful issue tracker template I'm going to go ahead and create a new issue tracker list using that template and you can see here I have all the information I would need to coordinate work with a team working on a set of open issues however imagine I have a small team working on resolving issues with a new tool that's been deployed across my business I don't necessarily want everyone who's submitted issues to see all the other issues or their status and I don't necessarily want them all to fill out every field I might have some fields that are just for the process of working on or resolving that issue in the past I've had very limited options around this very common set of requirements there have been options to turn on some Advanced permissions features to limit access modifi permissions a lot or perhaps other tools such as power apps um but with the exception of power apps none of these have really met that whole need but by far the most common workaround I've seen is to create a form in Microsoft forms and then deposit content it collects in a list using power alterate this isn't too complex to set up but it's complex enough to be problematic now we have a new and much simpler option if I click on the forms option at the top of the list I'm presented with an easy interface to create a form to capture information into this list I can design the form in a limited sense to keep it on brand and I can Define what list columns are included in the form and share just this form with whoever I want to capture information from so in my issue tracking example I'd have a form I'd send out to everyone in the business who wasn't part of the issue resolving team in some situations I might need multiple different forms on top of one list and I can do this too there are some limitations here right now though the biggest is that this is only available to people inside your organization so if you want to collaborate with someone from outside your organization the best solution for this type of workflow is still going to be that Microsoft forms based workaround where you deposit the captured form information into your list with power automate hopefully this will change in the coming months though as Microsoft's initial announcement of this feature definitely indicated the ability to share externally I have to admit that how duplicative of forms this feature is makes me wish that instead of forms focusing on Excel sync while lists is focusing on adding forms they just got together and made sying forms responses to a list really easy there are lots of uses of forms where Excel is the right place to analyze the collected data but there are also lots of uses where a better data storage platform like lists makes a lot more sense and having this bacation of platforms is probably pretty confusing ideally you'd be able to choose whether the back end of your form is Excel or blists or even something else like a SQL database or data verse depending on what the purpose of your form is or even planner or Loop could be targets depending on the form that you're creating the trend for good software development is only Loosely tethering your front end to your back end so I'm unsure why all of Microsoft's tools aren't abstracted on the user interface side from the data storage layer to allow you to Simply switch in different storage depending on what you're trying to achieve whether we think of forms or webinar signups in teams or how Loop components are stored this seems to be a problem we return to regularly because there are huge inconsistencies and disparities that make understanding the backend storage and ultimately what you can do with what's stored more challenging than perhaps it should be I'm sure there are good reasons for this in some places but I think in others it's just down to the different paths different products get developed along and it would be great to see an approach from Microsoft that provides more clarity in this regard hopefully these three new capabilities are useful to you and you can try them out soon thanks for watching through to the end until the next video [Music] [Music] bye-bye

Channel: Bright Ideas Agency

Views: 3,073

Keywords: microsoft forms, microsoft forms new features, how to use microsoft forms, new features in microsoft forms, microsoft forms advanced features, new features in ms forms, microsoft 365, ms forms, copilot in forms, forms copilot, microsoft forms copilot, copilot for microsoft forms, microsoft copilot for forms, microsoft lists, microsoft forms tutorial, ms forms tutorial, microsoft forms tips, microsoft forms tutorial 2024

Id: Ca360K0YQ08

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2024