Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, review Microsoft Forms, which lets users create and share online surveys, quizzes, polls, and forms. Collect feedback, measure satisfaction, test knowledge, and more. Watch the video, listen to the audio, or read the transcript.
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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS: Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA, Randy Johnston.
Randy Johnston 00:11
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host, Brian Tankersley, we have a topic on Microsoft forms for you today, and what we wanted to do is just give you some insights as to where forms could actually make some sense for you to use in your business and personal life. So Brian, I know you’ve done a few forms for your B business and many other things too. But how would you like to start off today?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:40
Well, I mean, forms. Forms is one of those tools that’s included with Microsoft 365 both home and business, and it’s you can even use it. I think even if you’re not a Microsoft 365 member with it, you know, so you don’t have a subscription, you can still use it. And again, I don’t care whether you use Google Forms or Microsoft forms or whatever. The goal here is to not key in data more than once. And so the, you know, if you use forms, it makes it possible now for you to collect data and then to run it through automate, then to have, have, you know, people filling out a form, trigger some kind of workflow with power automate that we’ve, you know, that again, we’ve talked about in the past a little bit. And then to have automation do this, you know, again, if you want to survive in this world of of automated accounting, you have to let the automation do the work, and that means you’re going to have to figure out how to make it work and how to do the plumbing associated with it. Okay? Because, again, the the days of, you know, again, my back problems from hauling trunks in the 1990s would seem very quaint. If I were to talk to a bunch of new interns that were coming into accounting firms, you know, if I talked about the things I did with 10 key adding machines and all that kind of stuff back, you know, back in the 80s and 90s, they’d look at me like I was completely out of my mind. And so I just kind of want you to see that that’s the that’s the stuff there. Now, this is designed for non IT users. Okay? So it is not as powerful and customizable as the, as you know, more sophisticated forms tools, but it’s also easier for non technical users to use, okay? I often describe this as the forms tool that my mother could have used, okay? And it very much is that so you could use this to collect data. You could use this. You could use this for you know, at work. You could use it for your kids, T ball team. You could use it for just about anything. But the idea here is that you get people to fill, fill this stuff out, put the information in, and then you interface it, or you, again, you don’t have to key it in, 234, times. You just put it in and then let them act upon the stuff that they put in. Okay. So you know again, this, this k2 summit club customer registration is something I created for one of our courses we have this year. And it’s actually a QR code to a form. And so you can actually see that. I’ll talk about the branching logic and other things like that. But again, this is included with Microsoft 365 it can be used with power, automate Power Apps and a lot of other tools. It is truly a low code, low code, no code tool. I haven’t found a way to actually go in and inject anything more into this, other than, again, the begin to inject code into this. So it’s a very simple tool to use. Is designed for end users. And again, you’re gonna, you know, so again, the the idea here is for smaller groups and other things like this. If you’re dealing with the form that’s going to get filled out 500 times, then you probably want to get something maybe a little more sophisticated. But if you’re doing something that’s, you know, where you have a population of 50 people that are going to fill something out, this is your tool. Okay, you know, if you have 5 million people, this is not your tool. Again, it comes with a wide range of things in here. You can also use Copilot to draft and revise the form in an interactive chat interface. If you if you have Microsoft 365 copilot. Now, there are a wide range of templates out there, and so again, I would say for most of you, there’s probably some kind of template that you can start with. Okay, you don’t have to pick, you know, there, there may not be something that’s directly on point, but there’s usually something that’s close that you can then modify, like, for example, if you needed to have a somebody express interest in something in a particular topic, or something like that, what you can actually do is You can actually take the templates and you could modify them to do what you want them to do. And again, start out with something that just has name and address in it, let’s say, and then just add fields as you need to so. And those can also be shared with other people, from to others from within forms. So you can share their completed forms with them if you want to do things. Now there are a wide range of different things that are choices, text, text, numbers, rating, dates, rankings likerts that take sentiments and turn them into values, file uploads, net promoter scores, you can have sections the choice thing will actually also let you do branching logic within there. And so, again, you can set all these things up and set up the data validation to do the things you want. Okay, so, so, again, it’s a, it’s a pretty slick thing that you can do so that, so that, again, you make sure something’s valid. So, you know, and some of the things are not necessarily intuitive, like, if you are looking for somebody to put in a phone number with no dashes, no parentheses, no spaces, then you can set it up to be a number that is less than 10 billion. Okay. Why? Because 10 billion gives you 10 zeros. Okay. So if it’s got 10 digits, then that’s going to get you the, you know, the three digitary code, the three digit local prefix and then the four digit number. Similarly, with this, if I’m if somebody, I’ve got want somebody to put in an email address, I can put an at sign and say it must include an at sign, and I can filter out stuff where people have not gone to the trouble of putting in anything that approaches a valid email address. Now, would it be better if I had more sophisticated tools? It would do more sophisticated validation. Yeah. But again, this is the WD 40, or duct tape of data collection and things in here. Okay, this is what you go get out of the junk drawer when you need to collect data from from other people. Okay. It also includes net promoter, for those of you that are trying to track customer experience and other things like that. With that, I’ll turn it over to Randy for a second see if he has any general observations here.
Randy Johnston 06:48
You know, you’ve got so many junk drawer. WD, 40 pieces on it. Brian, it really is, though, a simple way to structure data, and rather than doing you know the traditional, you know form, which you might do in PDF, and we’ve taught others how to do that in the past with Adobe forms. Here you’ve got some that’s integrated tightly into the Microsoft world. And as we use more data storage list and other types of functionality Microsoft forms lets us populate this so you get a little bit of a pretty interface with very little effort. Yeah,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:31
now, now don’t think that you can’t do sophisticated things with them, though, because if you look at the branching logic in here, if you have a question, that’s a choice in particular, a multiple choice thing. In here, you can have different paths that are done forward. So here is an example of a form that I created where I, you know, k2 teaches CPA across the US and Canada. And so when I’m collecting data about people, I want to have name, phone number, address and country. But then if I have Canada, if I have people in Canada, I know their postal codes have three letters, three numbers in the US, we have five digit ZIP codes, and then the pick lists for the provinces and the zip in the States. I don’t want to subject them to each other, so I want to effectively divide up into those paths. And so you’ll notice that I actually created this little kind of flow chart for this, for how I set up that form. And so we can do these simple things, as long as we have the choices, where people pick the paths in here. And so it’s a, you know, again, you can start out with something very simple, like I started out with one simple form that just didn’t, didn’t have pick lists for states and provinces, and didn’t have the names of the state CPA societies, and didn’t have data validation for the zip codes. And what I figured out was that if I would put more data validation in and I would put the branching in there, then it would make it much easier for people to put things in the right way, so that I don’t have to reformat it later. So again, like, like a lot of things where you’re creating something new. It is an iterative process where you start out with something that works, and then you make it more and more and more sophisticated over time, and before you know it, you’ve got something that is actually a true, real automation tool in there. You also have good response reporting. The data is summarized in your on a single web page. You can also download it to Excel. You have summary stats in the in the session that I do for our tech conferences this year on that that’s actually on power automate. It’s called Power automate. Beyond the basics, I actually go through and in the session, I actually go in and create a workflow that when somebody fills out a form, it turns around and creates a mail merge letter with data out of the form and on the person that that put the information in from the available data. And I just kind of show you how use the I’ll use those tools together. So again, it’s very much like it’s, I would say, somewhat a now, you know when you’re using these forms. And using it with these other automation tools. In my mind, it’s very much like getting a Lego set where you have a decent set of directions. Maybe there’s some choices you have to make at some point in there, but at the end of the day, you have all the parts you need. You just have to spend some time figuring it out. And you know, again, I think it’s more interesting than doing crossword puzzle or a sudoku or something like that. So it’s just a it’s just a matter of trying things out, seeing if you can make it work, and going from there. You know, it’s definitely not as hard as an escape room. Yeah,
Randy Johnston 10:30
it certainly is. It’s so forms can simplify your life, can make things better for your family and friends and business associates. And why not use the tool that you already own? So that said, I think it’s been a great having you listening in today. We’ll talk to you again soon in another accounting Technology Lab. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 10:56
Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor.
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Tags: Technology