Validate open text responses in Microsoft Forms

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Forms Blog articles.

I'm excited to share that you can apply more rules to your open text questions in Microsoft Forms, enhancing the accuracy and quality of the data collected! Now you can create rules that help you validate the format of answers like emails and URLs. You can also require specific text in the answer and provide minimum or maximum length requirements. Let’s dive in and see how we can better use this in our daily work. You can also try setting restrictions yourself with this template.

Imagine you are creating a customer satisfaction survey. You add the following restrictions to your open text question to ensure the responses are meaningful and actionable:

Input must contain a certain word

To gather customers’ feedback on their overall experience with a specific product, ensure their response includes keywords such as "experience" to guide them in providing relevant feedback.

Set input must contain a specific word

Input length

In such a form, we usually ask customers for additional comments or suggestions. We can set a character limit for responses, such as no more than 250 characters, to encourage clear and sufficiently detailed feedback that is easy to analyze and take action on.

Set character limit

Email validation

In the end of the survey, you need to ask respondents to provide their email address for follow-up. Now you can validate that the input is a properly formatted email address to ensure accurate communication.

Set validation on email address

Responder experience              

When responders open the survey, they will find default text in the text box reminding them to input answers in the correct format. If they enter an incorrect format, they will be unable to submit the form.

Default text to remind right format

We only listed a few options you can use for your open text questions. Please refer to the table below for all the rules available.

This feature is currently fully available for Microsoft account holders and gradually rolling out to commercial users.