Microsoft Forms for Education

Forms for education

When you go to https://forms.office.com/, you’ll see that this is a preview of a new Microsoft way to quickly create forms.  It’s only for Education customers, and only in Office 365, but I thought I’d give it a quick test run, just so you can see what it’s all about.  People have been wondering about an InfoPath replacement for years.  From what I can tell so far, this is absolutely not anywhere near being an InfoPath replacement.  It’s super simplistic, and there isn’t much to it.  Here’s my quick walk through:

First of all, when I go to Forms, I’m presented with this screen that would potentially show me all of the forms I’ve created:

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When I create a new form, I’ve got a place where I can type in the name and description of the form:

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I name my form, and then when I click to add a question, there is a prompt to select what type of question.

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There are choice, check box, text, voting, and date fields.

I add a text field for “Destination” for this travel request, and then a date field.  See that each field has a slider to pick whether it’s required.  The ellipses gives me more options, in this case it’s just whether I’d like a subtitle for this question.

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Here’s what a choice field looks like:

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The ellipses options for the choice field are Subtitle, Shuffle options, and Quiz.  If you pick Quiz, it then gives you the ability to put checkboxes next to which of the answers are correct.

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Just keep clicking the add question button to add any other questions.  There is no interface for putting questions in a table grid, next to each other or anything like that.

At the top right of the design surface, there is a little icon of a paintbrush, which lets you pick the color scheme for the form.

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When I click Send form, I’m prompted with several options.  I can get a link to send or email, get a QR code, and even embed this form in a web page with embed code.  I like that!

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Click See all settings, to see some more advanced options:

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I used the link to fill out the form, which rendered nicely in any of my browsers:

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and this was the response screen:

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This is what the response page looks like.  It’s pretty simplistic, but I can see that it would be good for quick, very simple quizzes or tests.

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