Introducing the “File Upload” question type for Microsoft Forms

I received a message yesterday in my message center announcing “File Upload” as a new question type coming to Microsoft Forms soon. It’s currently listed as “In development” to be released this month. The message is as follows:

Click to enlarge

Why is this awesome?

This highly anticipated feature makes Forms more competitive with third-party form solutions such as Survey Gizmo and Survey Monkey.

Where will the files go? Group forms are stored in SharePoint, while personal forms are stored in your OneDrive.

As a form creator, you’re able to configure the following restrictions on the “File Upload” question type:

  • Max number of files
  • Max size of files
  • Accepted file types

You might use this question type in endless new ways, but here are some usage ideas:

  • Contract review requests
  • Solicit resume and cover letter uploads from internal candidates
  • Video and photo contests
  • Headshot updates
  • Data analytics requests
  • Writing competitions
  • Newsletter and marketing media submissions (articles, photos, videos, etc.)

Update 12/15/2019: File upload not available for external forms. Only available when form is set to “Only people in my organization can respond.” This may impact your usage ideas. Thanks to my friend Phil Worrell for sharing this.

Image courtesy of Phil Worrell (@Worrelpa) – Click to enlarge

Stay updated

If you’re like me, you’re likely to just make a form one day and notice the new “File Upload” option has become available. But for those of you wanting to know the minute it’s released, keep an eye on your message center. If you’re not an admin you can watch the roadmap for updates:

Roadmap item 59334: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=59344

Use Microsoft Forms and Flow to create Mad Libs

Have a holiday party coming up? Staff meeting you want to spice up? Send a form out to attendees in advance to collect adjectives, nouns and verbs and showcase your favorite completed libs at your meeting. Or just do it for fun – because work should be fun. Go ahead and try my test version to see for yourself!

Make your own (short version)

  1. Create a form at forms.office.com with questions for adjectives, nouns, etc. Be sure to collect email addresses as well so you can send participants the completed mad lib. You can use my template
  2. Create a flow at flow.microsoft.com that pulls responses into an email template. You can import the flow I built

Detailed steps

Create the form to collect words

Go to http://forms.office.com

Create an account if you don’t already have one (it’s free!)

Note: It must be an organizational account – Flow cannot currently connect to “personal” Forms accounts.

Create a new form or use my template (open link and click “Duplicate it” at the top)

Add a title, subtitle/instructions and then any questions/word parts you want. You must include email address as a required field if you intend to email the results to someone.

If you’re giving people multiple mad libs to choose from, you must also require a choice field like in my example.

Create the flow to send completed mad libs

This is the part that takes form submissions and turns them into the actual mad libs. It’s easiest to import the flow I built.

  1. Log into your account at https://flow.microsoft.com
  2. Go to your flows, click Import and upload the zip file you downloaded

Now select your existing connections for Forms and Outlook.

If you don’t already have an Outlook and/or Forms connection, you’ll need to click “Create new” and add them, then come back to connect them in the previous step. You can also modify the Flow to use Gmail or HTML emails instead. If you use HTML emails, however, they’re more likely to go to spam or be blocked since they come from a well-known “marketing” address rather than an individual (yourself).

Once you’ve set your connections, click “Import” (you should no longer see red x’s next to the connections under “Related resources”)

Once imported, click “Open flow”

Check every step, especially the “Forms” step to set the correct Form connection, and correct other fields like “email body” variables as needed.

Note: My Flow template has multiple mad lib options. If you just have one, you don’t need the “switch” at all (which is really just a conditional statement).

When finished, click “Save” in the upper right, go to your flows and make sure it’s “On”.

Finally, copy the “Share” URL from your form and send it to people to complete! Have fun!

Embed quizzes and/or results in SharePoint using Microsoft Forms

Asset 1quiz.pngThis morning I looked around for either pure javascript or custom service solutions for trivia or quiz embeds for SharePoint. The out-of-the-box survey web part wouldn’t allow the kind of features I needed such as showing a message upon submission about correct and incorrect answers, and I wanted something more robust than a newsfeed or Yammer quiz. I also wanted users to easily be able to change their own quiz questions and answers and no high-maintenance code solution was going to cut it.

What I learned? There aren’t a lot of free solutions out there for quick quiz creation and embedding in SharePoint. And the ones that are out there don’t look the greatest. Then I remembered Microsoft Forms has a quiz function! Don’t these look great? Even better – you can embed in SharePoint Server/On-Prem or SharePoint Online/O365!

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Microsoft Form’s quiz capabilities are incredible. In five minutes you can create a quiz that looks good, is easy to update and has features ordinarily only available with a premium subscription through other services. And as seen above, you can embed the results as well, making voting fun or showing a group how everyone is performing as a whole on a topic quiz. Here are some of the great features you get with Microsoft Forms:

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