We are excited to share that Microsoft Forms now supports pre-filled links, making your data collection process more efficient and improving data accuracy. This feature not only allows you to set default answers for your questions, it empowers you to strategize how you would like the responses categorized. To help you better understand how to leverage this new feature, let's try it together with an online training feedback survey. You can also try to pre-fill a form from this template.
Imagine your company conducted three online training sessions for participants in different time zones: Asia, Europe, and North America, each with a different lecturer. To streamline the process and avoid creating separate feedback forms for each session, you decide to use Forms pre-filled links to consolidate all feedback into a single form.
Find the pre-fill link from “…” icon
After creating your feedback survey, click on the "..." icon in the upper right corner and select "Get Pre-filled URL" to start setting your pre-filled answers.
Pre-fill link from “…” icon
Set pre-filled answers
Before setting pre-filled answers, you need to first activate "Enable pre-filled answers" in the top section of the form. After that, you can proceed to select pre-filled answers. In this case, the prefilled answers would be the session participated in and the lecturer's name.
Set prefilled answers
Send out the pre-fill link to different audiences
Once you’ve finished setting up the pre-filled answers, you can click the “Get Pre-filled link” button at the bottom of the form to copy/paste the URL for distribution. In this scenario, since you have three different sessions and lecturers, you'll need to generate three different links with different prefilled answers before sending the form to the corresponding audience.
Send out prefill link
Recipients open the survey with pre-filled answers
When participants who attended the Asia session opens the survey, they will see that "Asia session" and "John Wang" have already been selected. They can then proceed to answer the remaining questions and submit the form.
Survey with pre-filled answers
Here are two additional real-life use cases to provide inspiration on how this feature can benefit you: