Microsoft Forms to Airtable

[Kimberly_Milruy]

Has anyone connected data collected from Microsoft Forms to Airtable? We want to be able to show a photo for reference along with the option and Microsoft forms allows us to do that, plus our organization all already runs on Microsoft 365. We still want the data collected in Airtable however.

Thanks!

[Stephen_Orr1]

Hi @Kimberly_Milruy,

It's very possible and can be accomplished using Microsoft Power Automate to send your Airtable base an API call on each Microsoft Form submit. In your Airtable base, you would setup an automation that receives this call using the "When webhook received" trigger to process the sent JSON data and populate a record in your base with it.

Some useful resources:
https://support.airtable.com/docs/when-webhook-received-trigger

-Stephen

[Kimberly_Milruy]

Thank you Stephen for the link and info!

I am not a newbie to Airtable or automations, but haven't done much with connecting Airtable to other apps. Are there any step by steps on how to even set up the Microsoft Power Automate side of things to Airtable? (which is definitely something I am unfamiliar with)

Thank you and my apologies for the basic questions!

[Stephen_Orr1]

I'm less familiar with PowerAutomate documentation but the basic steps of the flow would be to first read a Microsoft form response (like in this template), then convert the form response to JSON, then send an HTTP request that includes the JSON in the payload to your Airtable base. 

Before attempting to create the PowerAutomate flow, I would familiarize yourself with webhook automations in Airtable by using https://reqbin.com/ or https://www.postman.com/ to make API calls to your Airtable base. FYI, you'll need to create a Personal Access Token in Airtable to authenticate these API calls.

Once you're able to update records from reqbin or postman via API, then the PowerAutomate flow should be easy enough.

Hope that helps!
-Stephen

[Stephen_Orr1]

Thought of a simpler solution.. You can use PowerAutomate to send Microsoft form responses in a CSV file to your Airtable base and Airtable can smartly process these in your base (either append or sync).

More info here: https://support.airtable.com/docs/airtable-sync-integration-emailed-data

This method makes ingesting data very easy if you can automate an email send with any no-code automation tool.

[Kimberly_Milruy]

Hi Stephen,

I really appreciate the extra thought and no-code option that you just supplied! When I went to the link for the email sync, am I correct in reading that it only applies to the Pro and Enterprise level airtable bases only? I am trying to build out this workflow for my organization and currently am running on the free account until I can prove that this would be the way to go for our team unfortunately.

Maybe I will need to learn the other power automate way that you recommended!

[BillH]

@Kimberly_Milruy I was looking into this myself, but came up with an alternate solution once I found out the client had already had Cognito forms on their list of approved apps.  Not selling that (but do like it and it's easy to use without code).

I did find this link, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/airtable/, but didn't need to take this much further.  It might be some help.  

[Stephen_Orr1]

Nice find, @BillH!

(Bill's link includes a comma at the end and works by copying and pasting to a browser + removing the comma.) It looks like this connector was created by a Microsoft community member so no guarantees it will be supported indefinitely (or updated if/when Airtable changes) but it could help simplify things, especially for a proof of concept!

@Kimberly_Milruy, unfortunately the email ingestion is indeed a paid feature. The cool thing about the "when webhook received" automation in Airtable is that you can continue to add on other actions triggered by the API call such as sending an email notification to someone mentioned on the form or looking up other tables in your base to link records to a submission based on some match.

Plus, learning a bit how APIs work this way will empower you to connect pretty much any web-based tool to Airtable, whether a pre-made integration is available or not. It might take some playing around with but it's a lot easier than it sounds!

Hope that helps 🙂
-Stephen

[BillH]

@Stephen_Orr1  

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I typed that comma.  Good catch.