Adding Media to Microsoft Forms

Tracking Developments in Forms and Stream

It’s hard to stay up to date with everything that happens inside Office 365, especially when Microsoft doesn’t tell tenants about new features through the Office 365 Message Center and announcements are scattered across myriad blogs in the Microsoft Technical Community.

Which brings us to a nice change in Microsoft Forms disclosed in a recent post in the Microsoft Stream blog. I hadn’t realized that you can add media to questions in a form, but as it turns out, you can now add an image or a video to a question (but not both in the same question). The idea is to give respondents additional context for questions which might be complex. The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words comes to mind.

Adding Media to a Question

To add media to a question, open a form and select the question. The Insert Media button is found to the right-hand side of the question title.

If you opt to add a picture, you can upload an image file from your workstation, your OneDrive for Business account, or find one on the internet using a Bing search. Videos can be selected from YouTube or Stream, with the caveat that Stream videos are only accessible to users within an Office 365 tenant because Stream doesn’t currently support guest user access.

Figure 1 shows how adding an image or video to a question can give more information to respondents about the questions they are asked to answer.

As with anything to do with images or videos, please make sure that the use of an image or video in a form respects copyright. You wouldn’t like to be sued!

Admin Control

The ability to add images (from Bing) and videos (from YouTube) is controlled in the Microsoft Forms section of Settings in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. If you disable YouTube videos, Forms replaces the embedded video with a link to take the reader to YouTube.

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Forms isn’t covered in the main Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, but you can find some great content about Forms in Chapter 9 of the companion volume, available to all subscribers.