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Is there an edit history or version history in Microsoft Forms yet?

Anonymous
2022-09-19T22:10:32+00:00

A colleague of mine created a form to use for employees to input information about the calls they are servicing, which included critical response information. One of their supervisors had been given a collaborate link, and mistakenly deleted several of the questions, thinking she was in the fillable form version. This took the critical data that had been captured with it.

Is there a version history or edit history, or any way at all to either recover the lost field information or lock it down in the future? (Obviously, we can limit the distribution of the collaborate link more selectively).

If not, I find it quite staggering that the industry titan who allows you to lock, password protect, and create detailed version histories of its traditional document formats would exclude such features from a paid product.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Microsoft Forms | For business

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  1. Anonymous
    2022-09-20T00:10:18+00:00

    Dear David Gorham,

    Good day! Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community.

    I went through your question and it seems your colleague created a Microsoft Form, which included very important information (Responses). One of the users with a collaborative permission accidentally deleted some questions, and this led to automatic deletion of the other critical response information! I'm terribly sorry for the inconvenience this issue has caused!

    1. Is there any possibility that before this happened, you had clicked on the "Open In Excel" button in Microsoft Forms? If you clicked this button before, you could find all your your questions and responses in the Excel file, in Downloads Folder.

    And if you didn't click this before, I suggest you raise a Ticket to Microsoft Support. We would also love to help you on this issue, but this issue may require the involvement of our colleagues from the Microsoft Support Team. The Engineers from this team have higher permission than us to access resources to check this issue from the back end. Another advantage is that they have permission to help you contact another bigger team if necessary. For this matter, please if you are not admin in your company, contact your IT Admin to help you raise a Ticket to Microsoft Support following the steps given in this article: Get support - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Docs. I am sure our Expert Engineers from that side will focus on this issue and help you.

    About your question "Is there an edit history or version history in Microsoft Forms yet?".

    I'm afraid to say, Not yet!

    But we have high hopes that it will be implemented soon because many other customers have already requested for it. I have also added my vote for this feature functionality because it is very important and highly needed as it is in SharePoint. Please add your vote on Microsoft Forms Feedback portal via this link and encourage your team members to do the same: version history · Community (microsoft.com)

    Our Product Team is in-charge of the site and they check all customer feedback comments, discuss and develop those suggested features. Microsoft values its customers and I'm sure that they will introduce this feature very soon.

    Meanwhile, as a Workaround, to avoid losing important response information, let us always have a backup of responses by clicking "Open in Excel" button, to keep the version history of Microsoft Forms as we wait on the Developers Team to introduce version History feature to Microsoft Forms.

    Thank you for your kind understanding and cooperation! Good luck and stay safe.

    With Sincerest Regards,

    Edwine | Microsoft Community Moderator

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-03-08T18:52:29+00:00

    Forms silently and automatically saves and publishes any change that you make with no version history or rollback capability. I literally can't think of another product that our company uses that has such a reckless disregard for user intent.

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  2. Anonymous
    2023-01-18T13:25:53+00:00

    Same here...version history would be great

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-03-14T19:03:18+00:00

    Would also be nice to be able to lock the question fields and to have permission levels like in SharePoint. I work as part of an admin team and when I create forms I would like to share it with them but not allow them to change the questions fields. I unfortunately had someone use one of the created registration forms to register for the conference and not the registration links and it changed all the questions that was asked to their registration information.

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  4. Anonymous
    2022-12-15T12:05:36+00:00

    Interesting that there's no history version for MS Forms. What a shame. Some from our team shared the collaboration Link instead of the Collect Responses. now all questions need to be re-done.

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