You can quickly create surveys with Excel and make them available online with all results saved in the spreadsheet hosted in Office365. Just create an Excel spreadsheet in Office365 and choose the Survey item on the ribbon to design it.
A link is provided to share with people to respond. They don’t need to have Excel or Office365. Just a web browser. Try our sample by clicking the image below:
Shorten the URL
Excel provides a very long URL to share your survey. By using a site like bit.ly, you can create a shorter one to email to your contacts. This is important to avoid problems when URLs get word wrapped in emails. For instance, this survey is shortened to https://bit.ly/2qmSweG.
Results in Your Spreadsheet
The results go directly into your spreadsheet with each submission as a separate row:
Having the ability to create a survey and see the results in a spreadsheet in minutes, is a terrific tool to help your projects!
A few years ago, we migrated our email service to Microsoft’s Office365 cloud service. Overall, it’s been very reliable and eliminated the challenges we had hosting Exchange ourselves. It let us get to our emails using Outlook installed on Windows, any internet browser, and smartphones. Office365 also offered other Office product online (Access Web Apps, Excel, Word, etc.), SharePoint and OneDrive Business.
Unfortunately, on the morning of June 30th, we discovered:
Delays sending and receiving emails
Some emails were bouncing back from recipients who couldn’t validate our Office365 Exchange Server’s SMTP (protection.outlook.com) with our domain name. That meant the Exchange SMTP server was no longer considered a trusted sender of emails from the @fmsinc.com domain.
Our use of the Office365 SMTP server to send emails with our Total Access Emailer product was also failing to authenticate against the server
The problems began the evening before. Needless to say, we aren’t happy about this experience which impacted us and our clients using Office365. Reports are that it affects Office365 customers across North America.
Contacting Microsoft, they confirmed problems with the health of their Office365 Exchange Server. Throughout the day, problems lessened but persisted. We hope the problems are resolved soon and that we’ll understand what went wrong once we overcome the immediate crises.
These are the reports we’ve received from Microsoft. We’ll keep you updated as we learn more:
Exchange Online Service Degraded
This is what the Office365 Admin portal shows for Service Health:
EX71628 – E-Mail and calendar access – Restoring Service
Jun 29, 2016 12:11 PM
CURRENT STATUS
Our investigation determined that an existing transport feature which is designed to expedite the delivery of email messages became degraded, which caused impact to email delivery for a subset of users. We’re bypassing the affected feature to restore service
User Impact
Users may be unable to send email messages through the Exchange Online service. Email messages may appear to be stuck in the Drafts or Outbox folders.
Scope of Impact
A few customers have reported this issue, and our analysis indicates that for most customers, it’s unlikely that many users would report impact related to this event.
Start Time: Thursday, June 23, 2016, at 3:00 PM UTC
Preliminary Root Cause
An existing transport feature that is designed to expedite the delivery of email messages became degraded, which caused impact to email delivery for a subset of users
EX71628 – E-Mail and calendar access – Extended recovery
Jun 30, 2016 2:18 PM
Current Status
We’ve developed an additional fix to address the underlying cause of the issue. We’re preparing to deploy the fix to the affected environment to ensure that the issue does not reoccur.
User Impact
Users may be unable to send email messages through the Exchange Online service. Email messages may appear to be stuck in the Drafts or Outbox folders.
Scope of Impact
A few customers have reported this issue, and our analysis indicates that for most customers, it’s unlikely that many users would report impact related to this event.
Start Time: Thursday, June 23, 2016, at 3:00 PM UTC
Preliminary Root Cause
An existing transport feature that is designed to expedite the delivery of email messages became degraded, which caused impact to email delivery for a subset of users.
Next Update by: Saturday, July 2, 2016, at 7:00 PM UTC
EX71674 – E-Mail timely delivery – Service restored
Jun 30, 2016 7:35 PM
Final Status
We’ve confirmed that the remaining message queues have now drained after implementing a configuration change to optimize message filtering.
User Impact
Users were experiencing delays when sending and receiving email messages. Affected users may have received Non-Delivery Reports (NDR) when sending email messages.
Scope of Impact
Customer reports indicated that many users likely experienced impact related to this event. Our analysis indicates that this issue may potentially have affected any of your users attempting to send or receive mail.
Start Time: Thursday, June 30, 2016, at 2:30 PM UTC
End Time: Thursday, June 30, 2016, at 11:30 PM UTC
Preliminary Root Cause
The infrastructure responsible for processing Exchange Online Protection (EOP) message filtering became degraded.
Next Steps
We’re analyzing performance data and trends on the affected systems to help prevent this problem from happening again.
We’re reviewing our code for optimizations and automated recovery options.
We’ll publish a post-incident report within five business days.
EX71674 – E-Mail timely delivery – Service restored
Jul 1, 2016 12:08 AM
Final Status
We’ve rolled out the fix and confirmed that service is restored. Any meeting requests created during the outage will need to have the conference room calendar removed and readded to book the room.
User Impact
Users that attempted to create a meeting request with a conference room calendar were unable to successfully book a conference room. This lead to conference rooms being booked by multiple resources.
Scope of Impact
A few customers reported this issue, and our analysis indicated that this may have affected any users attempting to use this feature.
Start Time: Monday, June 27, 2016, at 6:00 PM UTC
End Time: Friday, July 1, 2016, at 2:54 AM UTC
Preliminary Root Cause
A recent update affected the ability for calendar invite requests to successfully book conference rooms.
Next Steps
We’re reviewing our deployment and provisioning procedures to help prevent this kind of problem in the future.
We’ll publish a post-incident report within five business days.
Microsoft Office 365 is Microsoft’s new and popular way to license the Office products for online and desktop use. It also includes hosted Exchange for email, SharePoint, OneDrive for shared hard disk files, and the communications package Lync. The cloud based platform means Microsoft takes care of the system administration to update versions, apply security patches, monitor usage, ensure uptime and connectivity, and address hardware problems.
Let Microsoft Take Care of Exchange and Email
If you are still hosting your own Exchange Server in your facility, it’s time to consider outsourcing so Microsoft can worry about the versions, patches, hardware failures, and other maintenance chores. Microsoft will also host it in a real data center with reliable power sources, battery backups, multiple internet trunk lines, and enterprise quality physical security.
If you’re already outsourcing your email/Exchange hosting, Office 365 is a wonderful alternative and lets Microsoft deal with the challenges of keeping email up and running 24/7/365.
Includes Desktop Copies of Microsoft Office
If an option includes the Windows copies of Office, you can install on your local machine Office 2013 copies of Microsoft Access, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word, Lync, and InfoPath. This lets you have both the online versions of Office and the traditional non-Internet dependent local copy.
Office 365 with SharePoint and Access Web Apps with SQL Azure
With Office 365, the hassles of hosting and maintaining your own SharePoint site is gone. Microsoft takes care of that for you and lets you create both private and public web sites.
You can also enable Access Web Apps to create simple database solutions with data automatically hosted in SQL Server (SQL Azure). The data can also be shared with other applications such as the desktop version of Microsoft Access.
Office 365 Options
There are many options based on your situation:
Business Plans with special pricing for Small Businesses (< 25 users), Midsize (< 300 users) and Enterprise (unlimited)
Non-Profit Plans (Microsoft offers free licenses to qualified 501c(3) organizations)
Click on these links for free 30 day trial offers (pricing below assumes a one year commitment):
Office 365 Enterprise E3 Trial – 25 licenses (Details)
E3 price is regularly $20/user/month and includes the Office desktop versions. Depending on options, prices range from $4 to $22 per user/month
Office 365 Small Business Premium Trial – 10 licenses (Details)
Small Business options are limited to 25 users in the organization. Premium price is $12.50/user/month, the basic without desktop copies is $5 a month
Office Pro Plus Trial – 25 licenses (Details)
This is the traditional Office on the desktop without the online services. Rather than buying the licenses upfront, Microsoft now offers the ability to pay for it on a monthly basis for $12 and install it on up to 5 machines.
Trial for Microsoft Dynamics
We are also pleased to extend Microsoft’s trial offer for their Dynamics CRM system
You can quickly create surveys with Excel and make them available online with all results saved in the spreadsheet hosted in Office365. Just create an Excel spreadsheet in Office365 and choose the Survey item on the ribbon to design it.
A few years ago, we migrated our email service to Microsoft’s Office365 cloud service. Overall, it’s been very reliable and eliminated the challenges we had hosting Exchange ourselves. It let us get to our emails using Outlook installed on Windows, any internet browser, and smartphones. Office365 also offered other Office product online (Access Web Apps, Excel, Word, etc.), SharePoint and OneDrive Business.
Contacting Microsoft, they confirmed problems with the health of their Office365 Exchange Server. Throughout the day, problems lessened but persisted. We hope the problems are resolved soon and that we’ll understand what went wrong once we overcome the immediate crises.
Microsoft Office 365 is Microsoft’s new and popular way to license the Office products for online and desktop use. It also includes hosted Exchange for email, SharePoint, OneDrive for shared hard disk files, and the communications package Lync. The cloud based platform means Microsoft takes care of the system administration to update versions, apply security patches, monitor usage, ensure uptime and connectivity, and address hardware problems.
If you are still hosting your own Exchange Server in your facility, it’s time to consider outsourcing so Microsoft can worry about the versions, patches, hardware failures, and other maintenance chores. Microsoft will also host it in a real data center with reliable power sources, battery backups, multiple internet trunk lines, and enterprise quality physical security.
With Office 365, the hassles of hosting and maintaining your own SharePoint site is gone. Microsoft takes care of that for you and lets you create both private and public web sites.
