There are several options available within the Microsoft 365 toolkit to collect and analyse data; one of the most easy-to-use elements for this is Forms.
Forms, as its name makes obvious, is a piece of software that allows you to create interactive forms with multimedia content. It can be used to gather data from a wide variety of sources, for a wide variety of reasons.
Potentially useful for pretty much anyone, it can be used for home, business, or education, and is available as a web app (in-browser only) on desktop or mobile. It can be used to make surveys, polls, quizzes, or even invitations to events.
Forms can be used in a personal or home context; find out where your large group of friends may want to go on a trip or holiday, or get quick responses to a digital party invitation. Because all of the information is stored within your Microsoft account, it’s available from anywhere, and not easy to lose like a piece of paper!
Feedback from customers or clients is critical to the development and success of a business. Assess how well you meet customer expectations, ask them what they like about your services or products, or ask what could be done to improve them. This can be done easily with Forms; you can send a link via email that will collect the data anonymously and provide some basic insights on the responses received – for example, a percentage of how many people out of the total number who have responded picked a certain response option.
Forms can be used to pose quizzes and questions in an educational or employment training setting – the software can auto-score any quiz and provide feedback to the user on their score.
It may also be used anonymously within a company to gather responses on employee satisfaction and comfort, somewhat like a digital suggestion box – as a happy and relaxed staff are vital to the continued success of a business or organisation. This has been very important in many newly-implemented hybrid environments, in order to let the organisation know how well their employees are handling the changes, or if there are areas that need attention.
Data collected in forms may also be exported and used in Microsoft Power BI (Data analytics) or for use in other apps and formats such as Excel. Forms also integrates with Teams, allowing you to post a form directly into a teams channel and have your participants fill it in from within the Teams app.
