Microsoft Forms: Latest new features

Microsoft Forms exists to help people get insightful data through surveys and quizzes. Users can respond almost in any browser or mobile device. Seeing real-time results as they’re being submitted, being able to use built-in analytics to evaluate responses, and exporting results to Excel are some of the Microsoft Forms’ features.

In April 2021, Microsoft announced three new features to improve our experience with Microsoft Forms. Here’s how you can get even more insightful and usable data.

Automatically Add Estimated Response Time

Microsoft Forms is now able to show the estimated time it would take to respond to a form. Using Design Intelligence, these predictions are based on the types and numbers of questions that are used.

Showing the estimated response time below the title of the form might help increase response rates.

New Forms Data Insights

The ‘’Ideas’’ button you used to access from the Forms design page, and gave you data insights on your responses, has been removed.

However, now you’ll see an ‘’Insights’’ button below each question if they have enough data to analyze. This new feature provides clearer insights for each specific question.

Some of the insights this feature provides are:

Sentiment analysis on open-response questions
Score distribution for ratings questions
Association rule analysis that notices patterns in responses across multiple choice questions

This button was created to provide easy-to-read data visualization, with the possibility to pin for quick future references.

Word Clouds Insights for Open-Text Responses

Word Clouds is a new intelligence-based data insights type for Open-Text Responses. Microsoft Forms will extract the relevant key phrases from the responses to a question. You’ll be able to visualize the results in a word cloud.

The Word Cloud will give you a quick view on the top phrases/words among the responses. By clicking any key phrase in the cloud, you’ll find statistics on the number and percentage of respondents that mentioned this phrase in their responses.

Nevertheless, you may not always get a Word Cloud, if Forms doesn’t find any meaningful results to show, or doesn’t have enough data.