For your surveys and polls, consider Microsoft Forms

1. You'd like some reader input as part of a makeover of your monthly newsletter.
2. You're in charge of the box lunches for your office retreat. Roast beef or ham, white or wheat, chocolate chip or snickerdoodle? You need answers.
3. You're part of a search committee and need an evaluation form to collect feedback on each finalist.

Forms is a tool in the Microsoft product lineup that can help with all these tasks and many more. It's in your apps dashboard and it's free for all faculty, staff and students as part of the university's Microsoft contract.

As the name suggests, Forms is versatile. It's a real-time survey tool that also works well for event registration, voting, satisfaction surveys, award nominations, feedback collection, raffles and other operations functions. You can begin with a template from a gallery or start from scratch, depending on your needs.

Responses are stored within the form itself, and you can view summaries or individual responses. You also may open the data in Excel for a deeper analysis.

"It's pretty intuitive, but it's also powerful. Forms has been around close to 10 years and Microsoft is improving its functionality all the time," said Don Paulsen, a support specialist in the IT Solution Center. He also serves as administrator of Iowa State's academic survey tool, Qualtrics.

"We're encouraging people to select the tool that best fits what your team is trying to do," he said. "If your project doesn't require a complex workflow or lots of statistical analysis; for example, if you're polling your colleagues for pizza toppings for lunch, Forms might be a good fit. Give it a look."

LinkedIn Learning in Workday includes two training modules for Forms, a 30-minute tips option or a more in-depth 60-minute session.

Forms:

• Offers various types of questions, including rating, ranking, multiple choice and branching logic.
• Includes a free-form text response option.
• Groups questions into sections (optional)
• Contains analytics to evaluate responses as they come in.
• Visualizes data in graphs, pie charts and other options.
• Allows collaborators on a form.
• Exports data to Excel.
• Integrates with Microsoft's Power Business Intelligence, an analytics tool set that converts data to visuals for decision making.

Qualtrics is a robust tool for academic research

Paulsen said faculty and staff should continue to use Qualtrics for academic research and more complex surveys and administrative forms. Iowa State renewed its Qualtrics contract last summer.

Similar to cloud data storage providers introducing volume limits across higher education several years ago, Qualtrics also is implementing changes as its university contracts come up for renewal. Where previously there wasn't a limit, Iowa State's contract includes an annual cap of 850,000 survey responses. Paulsen said the university is not at risk of exceeding that this year. If it did, the subsequent overage fee would be distributed among the college and business units that use Qualtrics.

Paulsen reminds campus users of options in Qualtrics that can improve the reliability of their response data by preventing responses from bots and other unintended respondents. Qualtrics users need to turn on these functions in their surveys and other projects.

Questions about uses for the survey tools may be sent to solution@iastate.edu.