I recently had a scenario where I had a customer who needed to capture timesheet data from her employees. She had been doing it manually up until then, chasing people for hours in the last minutes before doing a pay run.
She decided to use Microsoft Forms to capture the data.
In this tutorial we are going to cover the following:
Part One – Getting Set up
A – Setting up your list in Forms
B- Sharing the link with your users so you can see what they see and entering some data
C – Viewing the inputs
Next week in Part Two
- A – Getting your data into Excel and cleaning it up
- B – Constructing a pivot table to summarize the data
- C – Updating the pivot table with new data.
A- Setting up your list in Forms
This feature is only available with an Office 365 subscription. You will need to log onto your own Office 365 portal to access the forms. Go to your favourite web browser and type in Office 365 log in. When you are logged in, search for Forms. This will bring you to the Forms workspace. You can read a full introduction to Forms here
Here are just some observations from starting off.
- Have people’s names in a dropdown – people don’t always enter their names in the same way. The use of a dropdown gets around that. I show you how to do that in the video
- Make sure that fields for dates only allow dates. Also shown in the video
- Set up your fields for number of hours to only allow numbers.
- Doing all this saves a lot of data cleansing down the road
B- Sharing the link with your users so you can see what they see and entering some data
C – Viewing the inputs
Hi Anne, how do i share the Form?
hi Eileen, I covered that in one of the other videos in the blog post but what you do is that when you have created the form, you should see a green button (top right hand corner that says Share), You will then see a dropdown box that says “Only people in my organisation can respond”. If you want to share with people outside your organisation, click beside that and you will see an option that says..”Anyone with the link can respond”. Click on that. You will then see a link below that with Copy beside it. Copy that link and then send it to whoever you want to complete the form. Then then click on it, they will see the form and they can complete it online…hope that helps.