Microsoft Forms is great to create a survey, but what if you want to use Power Automate to process responses? Should you upgrade to Customer Voice ( aka Forms Pro)?

Microsoft Forms

If you have been using Microsoft Forms for a while then you will know how to create a new survey.

Microsoft Forms
Microsoft Forms

Microsoft Forms Pro/Dynamics 365 Customer Voice

When you use Forms Pro you might have noticed the recent rename of the product to Dynamics 365 Customer Voice.

forms in Microsoft Forms
forms in Microsoft Forms

Notice that in Forms Pro you have multiple environments that you can select. So similar to the other Power Platform products you can separate your forms by environment.

Forms in Power Automate

In Power Automate there are two connectors for Forms. One is for Forms Pro and one is for Forms.

Forms in Power Automate
Forms in Power Automate

The forms connector can trigger a flow when a new response is submitted by someone

When a new response is submitted
When a new response is submitted

Once you have a response you can get the details of the response.

Get response details
Get response details

These actions you can use for both Forms and Forms Pro.

For Forms Pro you have a few more specific actions.

Additional Forms Pro actions
Additional Forms Pro actions

That’s enough of an introduction to Forms.

So you are unfortunate enough that your organisation has Forms rather than Forms Pro and you have been asked to collect data from responses.

Now it is important to know what you can and can’t do within Power Automate and what the limitations are of Forms.

Get Response Details

The Get Response Details is easy to configure and for both forms and Forms Pro you will get the response details.

When you run a flow you will get for each question and answer.

Get Response Details output
Get Response Details output

And further down the action you will find a second representation of each question and answer:

Microsoft Forms connector not returning questions
Microsoft Forms connector not returning questions

In my case I wanted to create a flow that can process any Form without me having to adjust the flow too much.

The two options available both now don’t really work.

  1. Name of questions with answers
  2. Guids with answers

For each of my forms the name of the questions will be different. So referring to those names means that I’m in trouble when I want to reuse my flow for a different form.

The Guids will also be different for each form. What to do?

If you have Microsoft Forms Pro then you are in luck! You can now connect into the Common Data Service to collect the questions from the Guids for each question using the List records action.

List records in Dataverse
List records in Dataverse

Without any further query specified you will get the details of all questions.

[
  {
    "@odata.type": "#Microsoft.Dynamics.CRM.msfp_question",
...
    "msfp_questionchoices": "\"Option 1\",\"Option 2\"",
...
    "msfp_questiontext": "Test Pro Form",
    "msfp_name": "Test Pro Form",
...
    "msfp_sourcequestionidentifier": "rc15c39fa78a648c39a009fc547ede77b",
...
  },
...
]

So now we can use the GUID to query the Customer Voice survey question entity and get our questions.

If you don’t have Forms Pro you will have to do some flow magic to remove the ugly number so that you can collect the data only and strip off the Guids.

Other interesting Forms blogs

https://meganvwalker.com/microsoft-forms-pro/


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Avatar of Pieter Veenstra

Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. SharePains is not just any blog run by a Microsoft MVP. Have you ever used Try-Catch in Power Automate? The original post about Try-Catch in Power Automate can still be found on this site, https://sharepains.com/2018/02/07/try-catch-finally-in-power-automate-flow/ Or have you ever used the Pieter’s method to avoid variables and speed up your flows? https://sharepains.com/2020/03/11/pieters-method-for-advanced-in-flows/ You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com

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