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Microsoft Forms is a basic form builder that you can access as part of Business or Education Office 365 – but not if you have a personal subscription. It’s super-simple to use, but it lacks any features that would really make it useful. Quite frankly, there are much better options – read on to find out which ones I recommend.
Basic Form Builder That Makes Subscribing Complicated
Microsoft Forms is an online form builder that’s part of the Office 365 platform – but it’s not available for everyone – only Business and Education users get free access to Microsoft Forms, and you can’t purchase it separately, either.
It’s a fairly basic form builder that’s easy to use, but it lacks the advanced features that dedicated form builders often include, such as conditional logic and integrations with third-party apps. It does, however, support over 75 languages, including Russian, Polish, Czech, and Hebrew.
Overall, the form builder has the tools for creating a variety of interactive forms – but is that enough to make you want to purchase Office 365 for Business or Education? Keep reading to find out if it has what you need, or if you’d be better off with one of the alternatives, like JotForm or Ninja Forms.
3.0
Templates
Small Selection of Unimpressive Templates
Microsoft Forms throws in 12 templates to help you get started, and, according to its FAQ, all forms are optimized for a variety of mobile and desktop browsers – but “optimized” doesn’t necessarily mean mobile responsive. I’m still waiting for Microsoft to confirm whether its forms are actually responsive.
Templates include a customer feedback survey, a course feedback survey, and an event registration form – business as usual. But then there’s also an animal quiz (but don’t let your students see the answers below!), a birthday party invitation template, and a wedding save-the-date template.
I get that Microsoft Forms is designed for business and education users, but this selection of templates seems like a load of ideas were tossed into a hat and 12 were selected at random. Seriously, how does a wedding save-the-date form template fit into a product aimed at business and education users?
It seems like the templates were selected at a time when Microsoft Forms was going to be offered to Personal/Home Office 365 users – and then they changed their minds but forgot to add a relevant set of templates.
Not only are the template types pretty random, they’re also mediocre and pretty basic. You can customize the templates with your own questions, change the theme (i.e., the backdrop behind the form), and use the arrows on the question fields to move the questions up and down.
3.5
Features
Simple Form Features That Fail to Impress
Microsoft Forms gives you the basics for building forms for your business, or for academic research, but it doesn’t really extend beyond the basics. You have limited choices when it comes to adding new form fields or building your form from scratch.
You can choose from:
Text
Rating
Date
Ranking
Likert scale (a scale of choices, with ranges of options like “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”)
Net Promoter Score (used to gauge whether customers would recommend your business to others)
“Choice” or radio buttons (to select just one response, rather than multiple)
There are no options for fields such as file upload or autosuggest, so you’re limited in what you can do with Microsoft Forms.
When it comes to using your forms with customers, students, or parents, there are several “send” options. You can create an email to contact respondents directly, use the auto-generated QR code, or share a link to your form via messaging or social media.
There’s also the option to embed your form on a website using iframe, but I wouldn’t recommend this option. Embedding can cause lots of issues, such as putting your website at risk of cross-site scripting (malicious attacks), not working well (or at all) on mobile devices, and having a negative impact on SEO.
One-Click Themes
The feature that Microsoft seems so proud of (since it suggests you use it the moment you create your first form) is its Theme Selector button. With the theme selector, you can change the backdrop of your form with a single click, and you see a preview of what it will look like, too.
The themes available are a bit hit-or-miss, with some professional-looking backdrops (as you can see in the screenshot above), among some truly awful themes with backdrops that resemble the artwork of a 5-year-old.
Likert Scale
The Likert Scale form field is one of the better Microsoft Form features, and it can be useful if you’re conducting market research or academic research. You can choose your own options for the top row and add more if you need to. Some suggested options for this row pop up while you’re editing, but they aren’t particularly useful.
Multilingual Forms
If you need the same form in multiple languages, Microsoft Forms makes this incredibly easy. There are over 75 languages available, and the list includes even obscure languages as well as the more common languages seen on multilingual forms.
4.5
Ease of use
Not Drag and Drop, but Super Easy to Use
Microsoft Forms may not have a ton of advanced features, but it is incredibly beginner-friendly. Even though it doesn’t use drag-and-drop, it’s simple enough for a child to use, and if you’ve never built a form before, you really can’t go wrong with this builder.
Intuitive Interface
The simplicity of the Microsoft Forms editor makes it incredibly intuitive. There are no complicated settings. Every tool is accessible within a couple of clicks, and the editor is uncluttered and easy to navigate.
In-Editor Help
If you have questions, just click on the question mark symbol in the top right of the editor to bring up the Help sidebar. Suggested articles will pop up, as well as links to relevant guides (such as the Start Here guide for Microsoft Forms). Occasionally, when you’re working on your forms, a helpful hint will pop up to let you know about a feature you might have missed.
Click to Edit
Editing your form is a straightforward matter of clicking in the form field boxes and typing. There are no complicated formatting settings to navigate through, and any options are generally selected by either a drop-down menu or a toggle switch – e.g., to make a form field required, or setting a text-based question as a long answer (to display a larger text box). It’s simple and foolproof.
4.5
Support
If you have the Business version of Office 365, you contact support via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. You can use the support bot for suggested help articles (from the comprehensive help center, which is full of articles and FAQs) or go directly to the service request form.
When I filled in the form, the only contact method available to me was a call-back by phone – they promise within 15 minutes. This kind of response time is pretty impressive – or it would be if they lived up to the promise. I’m still waiting for my call-back!
4.0
Pricing
You can play around with Microsoft Forms for free – you’ll see (Preview) in the top left of the editor – but you can’t send or share forms without an active Business or Education Office 365 subscription.
If your university has participated in the Office 365 for Education program and you possess a university email address, you can freely access Microsoft Forms. Conversely, if you lack access to this edition, an Office 365 for Business subscription will be necessary.
Office 365 for Business has a 30-day free trial, after which you can pay a monthly or annual fee, which is calculated according to the number of “seats” (or users). It can get pricey if you have multiple seats, but a single seat isn’t much more expensive than the Office 365 Home (personal) subscription price.
There’s no way to subscribe to Microsoft Forms on its own, so if you’re not going to use the whole Office 365 suite (Word, PowerPoint, etc.), it may be a waste to pay for the subscription. It’s worth noting, however, that Office 365 pricing is a lot cheaper than some online form builders.
Comparison
How does Microsoft Forms match up to the competition?
If you already have a Business or Education Office 365 account, then Microsoft Forms is an easy way to build and share forms without any additional costs. If you have a personal Office 365 account or don’t have a Microsoft account at all, then going through the process of setting up a subscription just to use this basic form builder is hardly worth it. There are free online form builders that do more and are much easier to sign up for, such as JotForm. You can learn more about it in our expert JotForm review.
Ari is passionate about web hosting and design and has been building websites with WordPress for over ten years. When he’s not testing web hosts, you’re likely to find him trying (in vain) to train his three beagles (who are better at training him than he is them!)
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Very user UNFRIENDLY
Ubelievable that MS still doesn't get the autofill feature working with its MS Forms. A simple, user-friendly and timesaving feature that works in MS Edge browser with almost every form, doesn't work in MS Forms... Every time again I have to manually fill in my name, email, phone, address etc... FIX THIS Microsoft!!!
Cannot build from import with the correct answers (requires manual steps)
Is one way link to sheets only (can export but changes made ore not synched back to the form).
Very limited question types.
Created a form. Trying to go back and edit: lets me delete, but not add characters in the body. Lets me edit title, but not body.
Logged in and out and still no ability to add text in a section. No idea what is the issue - seems like a bug.
Another incredibly average/frustrating part of OneDrive
The sharing process is completely unintuitive and won't let employers batch-share forms - they need to be shared one at a time through a tedious process. Most importantly, long answers in responses get cut off in any summaries. There's a way to view the complete responses if you are an owner of the form with edit access, but again, for delegating to employees, it's useless.
Extremely limited for those working outside of a single organization
If you're using this app outside your organization, there no way to track who has responded to your poll. The same person can respond multiple times and there is no way to track this...all responses show up as anonymous.
In other words, unless everyone participating in the poll has the same @organization.com email...this app is pretty much useless.
I was filling in a form in relation to a project I am managing, where all info in all boxes is important for legal and compliance. When exporting as PDF, if a field is at the end of a page, it won't show the whole answer, just cuts it off. This means that a large part of my answer is just gone.
1. It's only good if you want to do a *very* basic, survey. It's not good for anything more complex. (e.g. a question that requires multiple responses to the same question. For example, "select which items from the list you prefer & *also* rank each selection individually on a scale of 1-5."
2. You can't make any major changes to the survey questions after you've circulated them. Otherwise, you'll lose all the responses to the questions edited & have to contact all those people to complete it again (which is what happened to me)!
3. There are issues with questions that consist of many options. If you write a list of options, every time you refresh the page, the order of them keeps changing. Plus you can't add subheadings, which would be helpful for these types of questions.
this website is appalling, i was doing an assesment and i was putting my answers in and i submitted the work but it said i was wrong because i didn't do a capital letter in my answer. i would not recommend this website to anybody it is awful and it is ridiculous
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