How To: Use Flow to back up Microsoft Forms responses in SharePoint

Microsoft Forms is a great tool to build custom forms and collect responses, but there are some key pieces of functionality that are lacking and keeping it from being fully business ready. One of those pieces of functionality that is lacking, is the fact that response details can easily be deleted by accident when a user deletes a question on the Form. It is best practice to back up the responses to the Form as they happen, and this can easily be accomplished by building a Flow to connect into the Form. This approach has the benefit of moving responses outside of Forms and into another more stable data source. The steps to create the Flow are detailed below:

1. Create a SharePoint list.
   1. For every question in your form, create a corresponding column in the SharePoint list.
   2. Make sure that the default title field is no longer set as required. If it is set as required, the Flow will fail unless you re-purpose the Title column for one of the fields that correspond to a question on the Forms.
2. Create a Flow.
   1. Add the Forms trigger called “When a response is submitted” and choose the form that you want to hook into.
   2. Add an “Apply to Each” action and where it prompts you to “select an output from a previous step” simply select “List of response notifications”
   3. Add the “Get Response Details” step from Forms and add the appropriate Form and Response IDs.
   4. Add a “Create Item” step from SharePoint that has the appropriate field and list specified.

We hope this helps save users from the pain of losing responses to Forms that they may need! Otherwise, if a user accidentally deletes a question within Microsoft Forms, all of the responses to that question will be deleted with it. So be smart, and combine Flow and Forms to make a stable solution for your business.

If this blog post helped your or you want to talk further about O365 please leave us a comment below or reach out!