How to Create a Poll in Microsoft Teams

Polls in Microsoft Teams are a quick way to gather opinions, make group decisions, or check understanding — without derailing a meeting or starting an email chain. Whether you are asking your team which day works for a catch-up, gathering feedback during a presentation, or running a quick knowledge check in a training session, Teams makes it straightforward. This guide covers every method available, from launching a live poll mid-meeting to setting one up in a channel before anyone has even joined a call.

Two Ways to Create Polls in Teams

There are two main routes to creating a poll in Microsoft Teams, and it helps to know the difference before you start.

The first — and by far the most common — is using Microsoft Forms inside Teams. Forms is Microsoft’s own survey and polling tool, and it is deeply integrated into Teams meetings, chats, and channels. Most organisations already have it enabled, and it handles the vast majority of everyday polling needs.

The second is the dedicated Polls app (previously known as Polly), which is available in some Teams environments and offers extra features like word clouds, ranked choice voting, and quiz-style questions with correct answers. Microsoft has been consolidating its tooling around Forms, so for most users the Forms-based poll in meetings is the primary method and the one this guide focuses on first.

How to Create a Poll During a Teams Meeting

Launching a poll while you are already in a meeting is the most common scenario, and Teams makes it quick once you know where to look.

1. While in an active Teams meeting, find the toolbar at the top of the meeting window and click the Apps icon — it looks like a small grid of squares.
2. In the Apps search box that appears, type Forms and select it from the results.
3. A Forms panel will open on the right-hand side of your meeting screen.
4. Click New poll.
5. Type your question in the question field, then add your answer options — you can add as many as you need using the Add option button.
6. Use the toggles to set whether results are visible to everyone immediately, or only visible to you as the organiser.
7. Decide whether to share results automatically after participants have voted.
8. Click Launch to send the poll to all meeting participants immediately.

Once launched, the poll appears directly in the meeting window for every participant. They can vote without leaving the meeting or opening a new tab — the whole interaction happens inside Teams.

How to Create a Poll in a Teams Chat or Channel

You do not need to be in a meeting to run a poll. If you want to gather input before a meeting, keep a decision thread in one place, or simply avoid scheduling a call just to ask one question, you can post a poll directly into any Teams chat or channel.

1. Open the chat or channel where you want to post the poll.
2. Click in the compose box at the bottom of the screen.
3. Below the compose box, click the + icon (Add apps) in the formatting toolbar.
4. Search for Forms and select it.
5. A dialogue box opens where you can write your question and add answer options.
6. Toggle anonymous voting and multiple selections on or off depending on what you need.
7. Click Send.

The poll appears as a card directly in the chat or channel conversation. Team members can vote from the card itself — there is no need to click through to a separate page or open Forms. Votes and running totals update in real time so everyone can see the direction things are heading.

Setting Poll Options

Both the meeting and the chat/channel poll interfaces share a common set of options that give you meaningful control over how your poll behaves.

• Multiple choice vs single choice — by default, polls are single choice. Toggle Multiple answers on if you want people to be able to select more than one option, for example when asking which topics they want to cover in a session.
• Anonymous results — when this is on, participants cannot see who voted for which option. Useful for sensitive topics like team satisfaction or preference votes where you want honest answers without social pressure.
• Result visibility — you can choose whether results are visible to everyone immediately, only after a participant has voted, or only to you as the creator. Restricting visibility until after a vote can prevent early results from influencing later voters.
• Voting deadline — you can set a closing date and time for the poll, after which it stops accepting responses. This is useful for asynchronous channel polls where you need a decision by a particular point.

These options make Teams polls flexible enough for everything from casual decisions to more structured feedback collection during a Teams webinar or training session.

Viewing Poll Results

During a meeting, results appear live in the Forms sidebar panel on the right of your screen as participants vote. You can see the vote count per option and watch the totals update in real time — which is useful if you are using a poll to make a quick group decision on the spot.

For chat and channel polls, results are visible directly on the poll card in the conversation. The card updates automatically as votes come in, and once the poll has closed you can see the final breakdown at a glance without clicking anywhere.

If you need more detailed data — individual responses, timestamps, or a spreadsheet export — you can access this through Microsoft Forms directly. Go to forms.microsoft.com, find the poll under My Forms, and open the Responses tab. From there you can export the full response dataset to Excel. Note that if you enabled anonymous voting, individual respondent names will not be included in the export — only the answer choices and timestamps.

How to Create a Poll in a Teams Meeting Before It Starts

If you are running a structured presentation or a Teams webinar, it is worth preparing your polls in advance rather than creating them on the fly during the session. Pre-creating polls means you can launch them with a single click at exactly the right moment without interrupting your flow.

1. Open your Teams Calendar and find the upcoming meeting.
2. Click on the meeting and select Edit.
3. In the meeting editor, look for the tab bar at the top of the window. If you do not see a Forms tab, click the + button to add it.
4. Inside the Forms tab, click Create new poll and build your polls exactly as you would during a live meeting — question, options, visibility settings.
5. Save the meeting. Your polls are now attached to the meeting.
6. During the meeting itself, click Apps in the toolbar and open Forms. Your pre-created polls will already be there, ready to launch with one click whenever the moment is right.

Using the Polls App in Teams (Advanced Features)

In some Teams environments — depending on your organisation’s app settings — you may also have access to a dedicated Polls app (previously known as Polly) from the Teams App Store. This goes beyond basic Forms polling and offers features designed for more structured engagement.

• Quiz mode — create questions with a designated correct answer, with automatic scoring. Useful for onboarding assessments or team training sessions.
• Word cloud — instead of choosing from a list, participants type a free-text word or short phrase. The app aggregates responses and displays them as a word cloud, with more frequently submitted words appearing larger.
• Ranked choice — participants rank a list of options in order of preference rather than simply picking one. Good for prioritisation exercises where you want to understand relative preference across multiple items.

To add the Polls app, click the Apps icon in the left-hand Teams sidebar, search for Polls, and add it to Teams. Whether it is available depends on what your IT administrator has enabled in your tenant’s app permission policies.

Common Poll Problems in Teams

• Forms app does not appear in the Apps search — this is almost always an admin permission issue. Your IT administrator may not have enabled Microsoft Forms in your organisation’s Teams app permission policies.
• Poll does not appear for meeting attendees — check that you clicked Launch and not just Save. Saving a poll stores it but does not send it to participants. You need to explicitly launch it during the meeting for it to appear in attendees’ view.
• External guests cannot vote — guest accounts in Teams have restricted app access by default. If you are running a poll in a meeting that includes external participants, check with your IT admin whether guest app permissions allow Forms access in your tenant.
• Cannot export results from Forms — only the person who created the poll can export full response data from forms.microsoft.com. If you are trying to export a poll created by someone else, you will need them to share the form with you or export it on your behalf.

If Teams is behaving unexpectedly in other ways — not just with polls — it may be worth reviewing how your team was set up in the first place. See our guide to how to create a team in Microsoft Teams for the fundamentals, and check out how to use Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams if you are looking for other ways to encourage participation in meetings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can poll votes be anonymous in Teams?

Yes. When creating a poll using Microsoft Forms in Teams, you can toggle on anonymous voting so that participants’ names are not attached to their responses. As the poll creator, you will only see totals per answer option — not who voted for what. Keep in mind that if your IT admin has reporting access to your Microsoft 365 tenant, individual votes may still be visible at the admin level even with anonymous voting enabled.

Can I use Teams polls with external guests?

It depends on your organisation’s guest access settings. In many tenants, external guests can participate in Teams meetings but have restricted access to apps including Forms. If your guests are unable to see or interact with a poll, your IT administrator will need to adjust the guest app permission policy in the Teams admin centre.

How many options can a Teams poll have?

Microsoft Forms polls in Teams support up to 10 answer options per question. If you need more than ten choices, consider grouping related options together or breaking the question into multiple polls. For more complex surveys with many options, creating the form directly in forms.microsoft.com and sharing the link may be a better approach than the in-Teams polling interface.

Can I edit a poll after it has been sent?

Once a poll has been launched in a meeting or sent to a chat or channel, you cannot edit the question or answer options. If you spot a mistake, the best approach is to close or delete the original poll and create a new one with the correct wording. You can close a poll from the Forms panel in the meeting, or delete the poll card from the chat if it has not received many responses yet.