Microsoft 365 Community Getting started series, 4 May 2022

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From YouTube: Getting started with Branching in Microsoft Forms

Description

In this 5-minute demo, Chris shows how to get started with Microsoft Forms branching. He walks us through how to conditionally display questions based on user input on the form.

📽️ Presenter: Chris Kent (DMI) | @theChrisKent

Resources:
✔️ https://https://forms.microsoft.com/
✔️ https://aka.ms/m365pnp
✔️ https://pnp.github.io/blog

A

Hi everybody it's chris kent and I want to talk to you today about improving your microsoft forms with branching. So a lot of times when you're creating a form. You know the tendency is to either ask too much information. uh Then the people filling it out or filling out a lot of extra information. They probably don't need to you know, fill out because it doesn't really apply them in this situation or you keep a little more generic to try and make it a little less tedious to fill out.

A

You don't quite get enough information, which means you got to follow up to get that later. Well, luckily, there's a solution to kind of the best of both worlds with branching. So let's take a look an example. So we've got this mail order, ice cream feedback form. So in this case uh we send out ice cream cones and an envelope to anyone that orders it online. um It's a wonderful business, but it has been having a few issues so we're proactively collecting feedback. uh So we've got these kind of generic questions here.

A

You know your issue type, uh your problem type. You know a quick description and email address now this is working great, uh but the first thing our ice cream technicians have come back with is hey. We need a little more detail right. So if someone chooses the wrong flavor, we need to know what did they order and what do they receive right? So, let's collect that information.

A

So fortunately we can come in here, and we can add that here we click on a question to add a new one. Right after it hit add new. We had choice and say what did you order and we're going to say you ordered chocolate all right uh with some other suggestions of vanilla and strawberry.

A

That sounds wonderful and then so I'll type it again. I'm going to copy that question and I'm going to say what did you receive and that allows me to have that same set of choices in the same way. So that's great. If I preview that hey there, we go. I'm asking the questions, I'm all good, except for the people filling this out. If I say ice cream or I've melted.

A

What I ordered and what I received has no bearing on the fact that it melted not really- and I don't really need this information on my end either. So why make people fill it out? So let's introduce branching to make that work better.

A

So the way you do branching is, you can think of it as go-to statements right. So it's. uh If you do this, then go to here right. So in our case, we want to say, unless you pick wrong flavor everybody else needs to just go straight up to the description. Question just skip questions three and four.

A

So we go to the question we want to branch from and we click on it to edit. It click on these three dots at the bottom right and we choose add branching right here and then by default. Everybody just goes to next. Instead, we're going to say, yeah go to description if it's ice cream melted.

A

If it's wrong flavor we're going to say what did you order if it's gross, then we're going to say description and if it's other we're going to say description now, when we preview that you'll notice that we're only asked the first two questions, because we're only shown basically up until a decision has to be made so in this case choose ice cream where I've melted form works exactly like before you just ask question number three is description.

A

Question number four: is the email address, but if you pick wrong flavor now you get our extra questions and it renumbers questions five and six here, and so it looks totally normal to the end user. But then we only collect that information when it makes sense, which is awesome, and this works great and that's all there is to branching. But you know our ice cream technicians will come back and said. Oh, thank you so much for that information. We love it so much, but you know what else we need.

A

If someone says it's gross, we really need to quantify that. We didn't know you know how gross was it. So, let's add another question right: we've we've just watched this video. We know all about how to do branching, so no problem. We come here, we're just going to add it here.

A

Another question right here we're going to say it's a rating and in this case we're going to say how gross was it all right, we'll let them provide a nice star rating there, and that seems fine if we preview that- and we still have our branching in place and so if you choose ice cream or I've melted, I don't know right. We don't see anything there, which is what we expect. If you pick wrong flavor, we can see what we expect it was gross. We don't see anything wait.

A

What was that on the wrong flavor you'll notice here now we have an issue here where it's showing here. So let's get that corrected, so we want it to show up when it's gross and not any other time. So, let's take a look. If we come back to our branching, we say that add branching again, we see well. Here's our first problem, which was gross, is jumping ahead to the description as well.

A

We need to go to how gross was it that solves that issue, but the other issue is uh when we go to wrong flavor.

A

We just start a question three and go on right, so it's gonna ask how gross was it so to prevent that we go to question four we're still in the branching, so we can click question four and say instead of go to next, we'll just jump ahead to description, description and description, and now, when we go back and we preview that now we can see that we'll choose ice cream where I've melted exactly what would expect wrong flavor, we get those two questions we'll make a decision on that one exactly as we'd expect and final for choose: twas gross, hey.

A

How gross was it right? We can rate that and go on as expected. So again, branching is a great way to add some nuance and to avoid a tedious extra entry for your users in microsoft form so check it out.