Modern SharePoint Web Parts Updates — Forms

ModernSharePointWebPartUpdates

I am a huge fan of the Modern SharePoint experience. Is it perfect? Definitely not. However, the modern experience offers a responsive design, easy to use web parts, and is user-friendly. I have seen customers adapting to Modern SharePoint faster than they did to Classic SharePoint.

 

 

The changes are following each other rapidly. The web parts delivered with the initial release of the Modern SharePoint Team Site are also evolving and regularly receiving updates. I want to keep you all up-to-date, so I decided to start a new series called Modern SharePoint Web Part Updates! Let’s continue with the forms web part.

A poll/form has been a crucial part of Intranet Portals since the day I started working with SharePoint. For the people who are wondering, that’s indeed a long time ago. We always had to acquire third-party web parts because SharePoint didn’t contain an out-of-the-box poll/form solution. I am not counting InfoPath because that was never intended to be used for that business requirements. Customers want to add a quick poll/form to ask their users one or more simple and short questions.

Microsoft Forms (Forms) was released a while back for the education part of Office 365. Forms is now widely available for all Office 365 customers. I haven’t done much with Forms, so I was definitely interested to try it out after the web part was released for our Moderne SharePoint Sites! Let’s take a look, shall we? After adding the web part the following screen appears:

SPModernWebPartsUpdates5 1

 

We can create a new form or connect to an existing form. Let’s create a new form:

SPModernWebPartsUpdates5 2

We give the form a name and click on create:

SPModernWebPartsUpdates5 3

 

The designer in Forms allows you to create questions with a couple different types such as choice, text, rating, and date. All the basic features of a poll/form are present. The Form saves automatically, so that’s perfect. After adding our questions, we go back to the SharePoint Site:

SPModernWebPartsUpdates5 4

 

We can show the questions or the results. Let’s start with the first option:

SPModernWebPartsUpdates5 5

 

After a couple people answered the questions, we changed the settings of the web part to show the results:

SPModernWebPartsUpdates5 6

 

Not too bad, a really nice overview of the answers to our poll/form. One requirement of a poll/form is, of course, the option to only answer the questions once. We changed the settings of the Form and the following happens:

SPModernWebPartsUpdates5 7

 

 

This isn’t great because we want to show the results to the people who answered the questions. I couldn’t find this option anywhere. Forms is still in preview, so I hope this gets fixed in the final release. In the meant time, I would advise adding the Forms web part on a separate page to prevent this message to be viewable for all the visitors of your site. That said, its great to finally see an easy-to-use and out-of-the-box poll/forms solution!