Microsoft Forms share some similarities with Google Forms. One of them is that a respondent can submit the form multiple times. If you want to eliminate bias and prevent replication, this must be avoided.

You can tweak the Microsoft Forms setting to prevent the same email address from filling out a form more than once. Here's how.

How to Prevent Multiple Responses in Microsoft Forms

Removing duplicates is a clean way to create professional surveys with Microsoft Forms. To activate this behavior, you only need to change a few settings while creating a new form or editing an existing one.

If you're creating a quiz instead, you don't need to change this setting, as quiz forms prevent multiple submissions by default.

First, open the Microsoft Forms website on a browser via a business, personal computer, or Mac since Microsoft allows anyone to use Microsoft Forms:

  1. Create a new form by clicking New Form at the top-left. Or, you can select an existing one if you've already created a Microsoft Forms survey.
    Microsoft Forms template dashboard
  2. Click the three horizontal menu dots at the top-right.
  3. Go to Settings.
    Microsoft Forms settings menu dropdown
  4. Under Who can fill out this form, click Only people in my organization can respond.
    • Or you can select Specific people in my organization can respond if you want to narrow down your respondents to specific people.
  5. Select One response per person. You can also click Record name to get respondents' names.
    Microsoft Forms settings tab

Once this setting is in place, feel free to share the form URL by clicking Collect responses at the top right.

Once you activate this behavior, your respondents will need to log in to their Microsoft account before they can access and respond to your survey.

If someone submits a response and tries to respond again via the same link, Microsoft Forms tells them they've already submitted a response, preventing them from duplicating your data.

Microsoft Forms warning page

Remove Replicas From Your Microsoft Forms Surveys

Microsoft Forms allows you to customize your surveys and collect responses in Excel files. If yours is a professional or research survey, replicated responses can debase your research quality.

Preventing multiple submissions from the onset gives you crisp survey data, free from bias and unwanted replicas. With that said, feel free to automate your data collection by syncing responses to an Excel file in real-time.