Microsoft Forms cheat sheet: How to get started

Microsoft Forms is a web app that allows users to create various types of forms that gather information from people online and store that data in the cloud for review.

Why is this useful? Surveys, questionnaires, and other interactive forms are a vital part of doing business. They provide a great way to interact with employees, teammates, customers, and potential business partners. You can use online forms to collect customer feedback or business requirements, conduct market research, gauge employee satisfaction, register attendees for an upcoming event, test learners’ knowledge after a training course, and more.

Forms is included with Microsoft 365 subscriptions for individuals and businesses, and a limited version is available for free to anyone with a Microsoft account. In this cheat sheet, we will cover how to use this program to create questionnaires, add specific types of questions, and view and analyze the responses.

Microsoft offers a variety of form templates you can adapt for your own purposes, and we will discuss how to use them — but first we’ll take you through the steps of building a form from scratch so you’ll know how all the parts and pieces work. We’ll also cover how to use Copilot, Microsoft’s generative AI assistant, to draft forms for you.

In this article:

How to create a form from scratch

How to create a form from a template

How to create (and edit) a form with Copilot

How to create a quiz

How to change your form’s theme

How to share your form

How to view responses

How to create a form from scratch

To start using the Microsoft Forms app, navigate to your Microsoft 365 home page, sign in if you haven’t already, and click on the Apps icon in the left panel. (If you don’t see a navigation panel on the left, click the Expand Navigation icon in the upper left corner.)

On the Microsoft 365 home page, click Apps.
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The Forms app should appear on the main part of your screen near the bottom. If it isn’t there, use the search option at the top of the left panel to search for forms and launch the app.

If you don’t see Forms on the main M365 Apps screen, use the Search function to find it.
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If this is your first time using Microsoft Forms, you will be presented with the welcome screen shown below, which offers templates for various types of forms. From here, select Survey to start your form.

The Forms welcome page shows templates for various types of forms to help you get started.
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If you’ve used Forms before, you’ll instead see a home page with a few templates plus any forms you’ve created or that have been shared with you. Click the New Form button at the top of the page.

The Forms home page shows templates on top and your forms below.
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Either way, you’ll start a new, blank form. If you see a panel listing suggested templates on the left side of the screen, click on the X at the top of the panel to remove it; you’ll learn how to use templates later on.

Close the templates panel on the left so your new form can take up the whole screen.
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Changing the form’s title

First, change the title of your form and add a description. This is the first thing anyone will see when they open your questionnaire, so make sure the title is easy to understand and explains what you’re trying to do.

To add a title, click on the title field (which might say something like “Let’s get started! What’s your form about?” or simply “Untitled form”), and you will be able to edit the title and add a description.

Change the title and add a description for your form.
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Adding questions

Below the description is a “Quick start with” link. If you have access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, you’ll also see a “Draft with Copilot” option. You can ignore that for now; we’ll cover using Copilot to create forms later in the article. 

To add a new question, click the Quick start with text. A menu appears showing multiple types of questions you can add to your form.

Choose which kind of question you want to add.
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Choice: Multiple-choice questions allow you to designate a set of answers from which the user can choose. You can also add an Other option, where users can type in a unique response.

By default, a multiple-choice question allows the user to select just one answer. To change this, click the Multiple answers slider at the lower right to toggle it on. The radio buttons next to the answers change to checkboxes, and users can choose more than one.

This multiple-choice question lets respondents choose more than one answer and includes an “Other” option.
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To rearrange the answers in a multiple-choice question, hover your cursor over the answer you want to move until you see six dots appear to the left of the item. Click and hold the six dots, then drag and drop the answer to its new location.

Text: This is an open-ended question where you allow the user to type in an answer — good when you want to collect individual information such as an email address or hear detailed thoughts from respondents. Text responses can be up to 4,000 characters. By default, text response boxes are designed for short answers, but if you turn on the Long answer toggle, the response box will expand as the user types.

To restrict responses to a particular format, such as a number, an email address, or a web URL, click the three-dot icon in the lower-right corner of the question box and select Restrictions. The Number format is selected by default. To specify that the number be within a certain range, such as between 10 and 500, click the Is number dropdown, select Between, and type the appropriate numbers in the boxes to the right.

Restricting the responses for a text question to numbers between 10 and 500.
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To change to a different format restriction, click the Number dropdown on the left, choose the format you want to restrict, and specify additional parameters.

Rating: Allows respondents to rate performance, typically on a scale of 1 to 5 (bad to excellent). This can give you an idea of how employees feel about their manager, for instance, or how customers view your product or service. You can adjust the number of levels provided (up to 10) or change the rating symbols from stars to numbers, hearts, smiley faces, checkmarks, or others.

Date: Displays a calendar and asks respondents to select a specific date, such as the date an item is requested.

Ranking: Lets respondents rank items in order of preference or importance to them.

Likert: Displays a list of items, each with its own rating scale. A common scenario for this type of question would be to find out how satisfied employees are with various company benefits.

Net Promoter Score: Asks respondents how likely they are to recommend your product or service, on a scale from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely).

A typical Net Promoter Score question.
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Section: This is not a question type but instead lets you create a new section within your survey, as covered below under “Building out your form.”

Once you’ve selected the question type, enter the question and responses you want respondents to see, then make any adjustments or restrictions, such as the “multiple answers” option for multiple-choice questions.

Here are a few additional tasks you’ll likely use when adding questions to your form:

To make a question required (respondents must answer it in order to complete the survey): turn the Required toggle on at the lower right of the question box.

To explore additional options for a question, such as the ability to shuffle responses or add a subtitle: click the three-dot icon to the right of the Required toggle.

To add an image or video to a question: click the image icon on the right. On the “Insert media” pane that opens, choose Insert Image or Insert Video. For an image, you can do a Bing web search, browse your OneDrive folders, or upload an image from your computer. For a video, you can paste in a YouTube URL. In a multiple-choice question, you can also add an image to each of the options.

You can add an image or video to a question.
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Building out your form

To add more questions to your form, just keep clicking the Add new question button that appears below the previous question and repeating the steps above. Here are a few more things that are useful to know how to do:

To edit a question: simply select the question and make your changes.

To duplicate a question: select the question and click the Copy question button at the upper right of the question box. A copy of the question appears immediately below it. This is handy if you have more than one question with similar formatting: you can save time by duplicating the question and editing it rather than starting from scratch each time.

Using the Copy question button can save you time.
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To delete a question: select the question and click the trash can icon at the upper right of the question box.

To move a question up or down: select the question and use the up or down arrow icons at the upper right of the question box.

To insert a question in between existing questions: select the question above the place where you want to insert the new question. Click the Insert new question button (which appears in place of “Add new question”) and proceed as usual.

To add a new section to the survey: select the question above the place where you want the new section to appear. Select Add new question or Insert new question and then click on Section. Enter a title for the new section. You can optionally add a subtitle and image or video as well.

It can be helpful to break a form into sections.
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Adding branching to your form

This feature is optional, but it’s powerful: You may have one or more questions in your form that you want to branch — that is, if the respondent answers the question one way, you can send them to a different follow-up question than if they answer the question another way. Thus, branching makes the most sense for multiple-choice questions.

It’s best to wait until you’ve added all your questions to the survey before you add branching. Once you’ve done so, select the question you want to branch, click the three-dot icon at its lower right, and select Add branching.

In a multiple-choice question, a “Go to” menu will appear to the right of each option. You can click Next in any of these boxes and choose a specific question to send the survey taker to.

Adding branching to a question lets you set different follow-up actions for different responses.
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How to create a form from a template

Rather than starting a new form from scratch every time, you can get a head start by using one of the templates Microsoft provides. Go directly to Microsoft’s Forms template gallery or navigate there from the Forms home page by clicking Template gallery at the right side of the “Explore templates” area near the top.

Here you can choose from a variety of templates including a market research survey, manager feedback survey, office facility request form, and more. Click on the Employee satisfaction survey to open it in your browser.

The Forms template gallery has more than a dozen templates to choose from.
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You’ll see a form that’s prepopulated with questions and answers. You can edit any of the existing questions, delete those you don’t want, and add your own questions into the mix.

Using templates gives you a head start on many standard business forms.
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Starting from a template not only saves you from having to enter all your questions manually, it may also provide valuable questions you wouldn’t think of on your own.

How to create (and edit) a form with Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the AI assistant that’s integrated with Forms and other Microsoft 365 apps. Access to Copilot in Forms is included with Microsoft 365 Individual and Family subscriptions, while M365 Business and Enterprise users need a separate M365 Copilot subscription. (Copilot isn’t available in Forms with a free Microsoft account.)

If you’ve worked with tools like ChatGPT or Claude, you understand that AI assistants can help you quickly perform actions that could be time consuming to do manually. In this section, you’ll see how to quickly create a survey using M365 Copilot.

First, go to the Forms home page and click on New Form. After you’ve given the new form a title and description, click the Draft with Copilot link to the right of “Quick start with.” Type in a prompt outlining the survey you want Copilot to create, such as the following:

Please create a survey that asks readers how they enjoyed the “Microsoft Forms cheat sheet 2025” article. It should be five questions long and all questions should be required. Also, give it a modern green style layout.

Then click Generate, and Copilot will create a survey draft.

A feedback survey generated by Copilot.
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If you like the survey draft, you can select Keep it. If you don’t, you can click the circular arrows icon to have Copilot try again or the trash can icon to delete it. A final option is to add more details to the prompt to refine Copilot’s output.

If you decide to keep the survey Copilot drafted, you should review it carefully and edit it. All generative AI tools make mistakes, Copilot included. In the example survey it created in response to the prompt above, for example, it included the text “This survey uses a modern green style layout for a fresh experience” in the description — not something you’d want in the final survey.

Also note that Copilot may not be able to do everything you request. For instance, it wasn’t able to style the form with a theme/layout in my testing (even though it said it did) — a limitation that may change with time. But it’s still a great starting point and a major timesaver.

In addition to drafting entire new forms with Copilot, you can ask it to create individual questions as you’re building out a form. Just click Add with Copilot or Insert with Copilot and enter your prompt.

You can also ask Copilot for ideas to enhance any form. When you’re working on a form, you’ll see a banner across the top that says, “Copilot has suggestions to improve your form.” Clicking this will generate some suggestions, such as choosing a fresh design.

Copilot can suggest ways to improve an existing form.
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Finally, you can use Copilot to improve individual questions. If you select a question in a form, you’ll see a Copilot button alongside the copy, delete, and move down / up buttons in the upper right of the question box. Click it to open up a prompt where you can describe the changes you’d like Copilot to make to the question.

Asking Copilot to rewrite a question.
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How to create a quiz

Quizzes are similar to surveys and other questionnaires, but with correct and incorrect responses. You can assign points to each question, report respondents’ scores, and explain why certain responses are right or wrong. A quiz is a good way to assess how well attendees of a training course have learned the subject matter and coach them in areas they don’t fully understand.

To create a new quiz, go to the Forms home page and click the New Quiz button at the top of the page.

Starting a new quiz.
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If you have access to Copilot in Forms, you will be presented with a Copilot prompt window. You could enter a prompt (including source material to base the quiz on) to have Copilot generate a quiz instantly. But for the purposes of this tutorial, click the X at the upper right to close out the prompt window.

The new quiz page looks just like the new form page. Indeed, creating a quiz is just like creating a form — you add questions the same way, except that you designate the correct answer and assign a point score to each question.

When you enter the answers for a question, you’ll see a circled checkmark to the left of each answer. Click one of the checkmarks to mark it as the correct answer. Then go to the Points box at the bottom of the question box and type the number of points the question is worth.

Quizzes let you test respondents’ knowledge.
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How to change your form’s theme

Now that we’ve covered the functional aspects of Microsoft Forms, let’s look at how you can change the look and feel of your questionnaire. Above your form to the right, click the Style button to open a panel with various layouts and themes. Look around and select a theme that you like to represent your company.