Loop through all responses in MS Forms.

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Posted on by _maaaaavs_

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Hello! I have an MS Forms with over 20 questions, but due to branching, the user won't be able to answer it all.

Is there a way to loop all questions in my Forms and filter only all the questions that has an answer?

I already have a working flow, but I'm using a Compose action and collecting each value one by one. Something like this:

My goal is to eliminate doing all this one by one. The reason for that is because the questions in my Forms aren't final yet. So in the future, the questions might change and I wouldn't need to put the new questions again inside the Compose action. Goal is even though the questions in my Forms change, I wouldn't need to edit the flow.

The question is, is it possible? To just loop through all responses and filter only the answered questions?

Thank you and have a good day.

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Building flows

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David_MA 12,970 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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I am not sure I understand your looping concept based on the image of your flow. However, you can wrap each question in a coalesce expression and put the question first and then add ", ''" after it to return blank. You can learn more about this expression at Blank, Coalesce, IsBlank, and IsEmpty functions - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn

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_maaaaavs_ 158 on at

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Hi, David MA!

Thank you for the answer. Sorry for the confusion, just disregard the image.

Is there just a way to capture all responses in my MS Forms and filter only the responses that has answers?

I'm just looking for alternatives work arounds here and simpler way to eliminate tedious step by setting them one by one inside the Compose action just like I did in the image.

For context and example:

Lets say I have a Form with 5 questions. So Question 1,2,3,4, and 5. But since I have branching in my Forms, the user can only answer Question 1,2, and 5.
What I'm trying to do in Power Automate is loop all of that 5 Questions, and since Question 1,2, and 5 only has answers, it will only filter that.
So in theory, the output would look like this:

Question 1: Yes
Question 2: Yes
Question 5: No

Is this possible to do in Power Automate?

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David_MA 12,970 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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There is no way to do what you want without writing an expression for each question in your form, at least that I know of. The coalesce expression would be ideal for this. You could have the output be:

Question 1: Yes
Question 2: Yes

Question 3: No response

Question 4: No response
Question 5: No

I suppose if you create an array, and then create a coalesce expression on each question, you could then add the result to your array. You could then filter the array to exclude items that contain No response.

Action: Filter array
From: FilteredResponses
Condition: @not(contains(item(), 'No response'))

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Karel (ACSW) 48 on at

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Hi there, I spent a bit of time researching this usecase for a similar project.

I've found the best / reliable way to do this is either with an Excel Online table or a simple JSON array.

If you use the Excel online, you create a table w/ a column for ALL possible answers,

you (sadly) still need to output each response value to the specific column in Excel via the 'Create row' action.

The same with a JSON array, you map all values with key, but make sure to allow null values (!).

Both methods need you to map out all the possible answers once, and the result will be

a tablerow or JSON array that holds values (for all the answered questions) or empty/null/blank values for skipped answers.

Now comes the fun part, you can now loop through the row (for each cell in tablerow) or the array (for each value in array)

with the condition is not empty (or null or blank) and then append the non-empty key + value to an object or array in your flow.

This will result in your object/array holding all the filled in answers from the initial response, which you can then use for other automation purposes.

PS: I use this logic to generate an Adaptive Card where the HTML body is generated based on the amount of key-value pairs I have. Works great.

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_maaaaavs_ 158 on at

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Hi, David MA!

Thank you for that. I would definitely try that solution.

But I've also thought of another work around but I'm not sure if it's doable or possible.

What If I store the responses in a SharePoint List? Lets say I have 6 columns. And I only want to filter the columns with values only. Is it possible?

| ID | Question 1 | Question 2 | Question 3 | Question 4 | Question 5 |

1 Yes Yes No

Is there a way to filter that? In theory, the output will be:

ID 1
Question 1 Yes
Question 2 Yes
Question 5 No

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David_MA 12,970 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Re: "What If I store the responses in a SharePoint List? Lets say I have 6 columns. And I only want to filter the columns with values only. Is it possible?"

If you store the responses in a SharePoint List and want to filter out entries with null values, it would be quite challenging. SharePoint's list view filtering is designed to handle one column at a time. This means you can only filter based on one question at a time, which isn't practical if you have multiple questions. Additionally, for open-ended text questions, you would need to manually select each unique response to filter out the null values, making the process cumbersome and inefficient.

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