Microsoft Teams has taken the world by storm and it has become the most versatile and utilized end-user service offered by Microsoft. There are already several components that are tightly integrated with Teams including SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Azure AD, and over 600 additional apps available in the App Store.
With Teams being so popular, it only makes sense for us to not only use it for collaboration, chatting, and video meetings, but also use it for gathering information from the millions of individuals who are accessing this powerful application.
This is where Microsoft Forms comes in, a powerful tool that can be easily integrated with Teams to allow us to gather information from individuals who we are communicating and collaborating with regularly. The integration of Forms with Teams provides a plethora of business use cases including; obtaining employee feedback, building questionnaires for internal and external users, building quizzes in educational establishments, taking polls, and many other situations where you want to gather information from employees, customers, vendors, or even complete strangers.
Let’s talk about what is necessary to add a form to Microsoft Teams. In our scenario we will be creating a simple poll on what is everyone’s favorite sport. The first thing we do is determine where in Teams that we want to add the poll that will successfully hit our target audience that we want to complete the poll. Being the form is created and accessed at the Microsoft Teams channel level, we will begin by locating the identified channel that will be hosting the poll. After accessing the channel we will see the default tabs of Posts, and Files, so we’ll click on the + sign to add a new tab that will be used to host our poll.
After doing so, we will be presented with a screen full of applications that can be added to the channel, with some of the most common ones being Excel, Document Library, OneNote, SharePoint, Website, and of course Forms. We will locate and click on Forms as the app we want to add to this new channel tab.
We can then choose to create a new form or Add an existing form that was previously created. When you choose to create a new form, it adds the form to the tab in edit mode so the channel members can collaborate on the creation of the form. After completing the edits on the form and it is ready for use, we can add the form to another channel tab by choosing Add an existing form and select the form you just created.
Regardless of whether you are creating or adding a form, you have a couple options; you can click Create a recurring survey which brings you to some Out-of-Box (OOB) Forms templates specific to individuals well-being/health check-in, and the other configurable option is whether you want to Post to the channel about this tab (which is selected by default) notifying users that a new tab has been added and it provides a link to that tab.
There is an additional setting available when you choose to Add an existing form and that is the Collect responses drop-down menu which allows you to select between Collect responses (the default setting) which allows users to complete and submit the form, or Show results which creates a web address that displays a summary of responses that have been completed.
After successfully adding the form to the tab, the tab name will contain one of the following action statuses as a prefix:
- Edit – indicates form is in the process of being created
- Fill – indicates we are collecting responses
- Results – indicates it displays the results about the collected responses
The Teams tab can be renamed by using the drop-down arrow on the right of the current name and choosing the Rename option. Using this drop-down arrow, you can also snag the link to the form, go to the website storing the form, open the form in your Teams desktop app, or completely remove the tab including the form, however it doesn’t delete the form.
Here is an example of a one question survey that I added to a Microsoft Teams channel by adding a tab the participants can use to complete the survey, and I added a second tab to view the results from the survey. It requires an answer, allows you to select multiple choices up to three, and allows you to add your own choice to the question:
The following steps are the consolidated steps used to add a Microsoft Form to a Teams channel in Microsoft Teams.
- Identify and access team and channel that is going to host the form
- Click on the + sign to add a new tab which will contain the form
- Choose to create a new form and walk through the steps necessary to create the form and it’s associated questions, or choose to Add an existing form that has already been created
Note: If you choose to Add an existing form you also decide whether you want to display the form so it can be completed and submitted by the participants, or you can choose to show the responses from the forms already submitted.
- Optionally you can use the drop-down arrow on the tab to rename the form, copy the link to the form, or go to the website hosting the form