Uploading files directly to Teams using Forms and mentioning team with Power Automate.

Microsoft Forms has gotten a new skill: file uploading. It is a easy way to starting processing and automating files forward. It could be a application, report, public announcement or whatever organizations come up with. In a way it is a substitute for building a file upload PowerApps or a more user friendly way than navigating to a SharePoint library and choosing to initiate a Power Automate to a file. There are also other benefits, like uploading files anonymously into a process.

Note: file upload cannot be used to accept attachments from externals. You cannot share a Form containing file upload field to anonymous.

File upload question

Adding a file upload to questions is easy. Just add the question.

You will be required to create a folder in SharePoint. When you are using Team/Group forms (as you should!) the folder is created in the team shared library.

You can also define number of files you want to upload, up to ten.

You can also define maximum file size for each file: 10MB (defaul), 100MB or 1GB

It is possible to use … menu to add subtitle and limit file types that can be loaded.

Possible file types are

• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• PDF
• Image
• Video
• Audio

For example if you limit files to PowerPoint, PDF and Image:

After choosing files you can hit Submit.

If you use file upload, you can not choose to get anonymous replies to form

Where do my files go?

Team’s Shared Documents library gets a new root level folder called Apps. There is a folder Microsoft Forms. The naming suggests there could be more apps to use the same structure in the future – or at least it is reserved for such.

Each form gets it’s own folder.

In forms folder there is a folder for each file upload question (lot’s of folders!)

The uploaded filename is original filename_uploader name

If name is not recorder the filename includes anonymous.

And as you can see in the two last snippets, the only good way to show these files inside Teams is to add a Document Library tab and navigate to the right folder. Upcoming new Files Experience can help with these I hope (with views).

Power Automate (Flow) and team forms with file upload

You can add a Power Automate (Flow) to catch up Form responses as before. An easy start is to add a Forms -> Teams template.

Something to note here, is that you cannot pick a group Form from a list. You need enter FormID manually – the easiest way is to open form in Forms and get the id from URL.

File information is in the response as array. I chose not to include that too in this longish blog post, only settling to notify team whenever there is a new response.

and the file is in this snip that was already shown above.