Excel and Microsoft Forms service

Everyone knows that at the end of the year I often post “recipes” that have something to do with the Christmas and New Year holidays. This time I decided to show you how to combine Excel and Microsoft Forms, a Microsoft 365 service used to create questionnaires, quizzes, polls… In this text, you will find out how to create a New Year’s questionnaire by creating a form directly from Excel.

If you open the Insert ribbon, you will see that there is a new option: Forms. Anyone who has at least once used Microsoft Forms to create a quiz or survey knows that this service stores respondents’ answers in an Excel file. This new feature allows you to use Excel for this purpose! To be able to run it, the Autosave option, which is used to automatically save documents to the OneDrive repository, must be turned on.

The creation of a new form is started by selecting the New Form option from the Forms menu.

After this action, Excel opens Microsoft Forms in a separate window. At the same time, a data table is created in the current worksheet, where the results of the respondents will be recorded.

Let’s call the questionnaire “Employee Survey”. By choosing the controls offered by the Microsoft Forms service, let’s add a few questions…

The process of adding questions takes place all the time within the Microsoft Forms service, and the questionnaire is automatically recorded. Clicking the Preview button launches the questionnaire. When you enter the answers, the result will be automatically added to the structured table located in the worksheet.

The Forms menu in the Insert ribbon contains several more options. The Preview Form is used to start the questionnaire, the Edit form is used to modify it, and the Send Form is used to send the questionnaire to respondents. Each of these options runs Microsoft Forms.

Where can you put this to practical use? When you view the Excel file with the results, the listed options can make it easier for you to modify the questionnaire, run it, and share it with respondents. In this way, Microsoft Forms and Excel work together and achieve greater productivity in work.