How-tos

Are you looking to create a form but unsure how to go about it? These step-by-step instructions are the perfect way to get started. In this article, we guide you through the form creation process from start to finish. We show you how to create, edit and publish your form. We also show you where to find the link to share your form and then later view the responses you have received. We have chosen a simple usage scenario to illustrate the overall process. You’re planning to give a presentation to your team about staying healthy. To help you plan your talk and ensure that people find the subject you pick interesting, you want to find out what kinds of health topics your team would most want to hear about. You’ve narrowed down the choice to three key topics: diet, stress and exercise. Your team now has to pick one. The topic with the most votes will become the main topic for your presentation. But let’s start right at the beginning.

When you are organising an event, you know how important it is that everything goes smoothly. A carefully designed registration form can also save you a lot of work here. The form lets you estimate the number of attendees expected, ask them about people accompanying them to the event, note any dietary requirements, and also contact them as and when necessary. In this article, we give you a step-by-step guide to using Formcentric to create a registration form for a summer party. Form users will also only be shown the details that are relevant to them, based on their own input. FIRSTSPIRIT_LINK

You can flag any form element as a required field. To do so, simply check the Required field box in the editing area. In the form itself, the form element is marked with an asterisk (*), identifying it as a required field. If users move to a different form page or try to submit the form without properly completing required fields, then they are shown an error message and cannot submit the form. The default error message shown to users is ‘ Please complete this field. ’ You can use Error message to enter a different piece of text that is displayed instead. You can tell your users what has gone wrong and give them specific instructions, such as ‘ Please enter your email .’

Four buttons are used in the form: Next and Back are used for navigating within multi-page forms, while Cancel is used to discard input and Submit is the very last element in the form. Find out how to use different labels for these buttons if you need to.

You can give your users help on filling out the form by including notes that provide additional information next to the corresponding form elements. You can explain to your users why you are asking for certain kinds of data, for example, or you can give them tips on how to complete form fields correctly. Whether notes are shown as a tooltip in the form or displayed directly next to the form element depends on the form design that you are using. Tooltips are a great option if you want to add some notes to your form without giving your users ‘information overload’. Depending on the design you have selected, small note icons or buttons are then included in the form. The note text is then displayed when users move the mouse over these elements. Since the text is not shown directly in the form, tooltips are also useful for longer notes. Notes that are placed directly next to the form element should only include small amounts of text. Enter the note text for the respective form element in the Note input field.

Sometimes, you will have users who do not need to fill out all of the pages in your form. If these users are shown the pages anyway, this costs them time and effort. Your users might even become so frustrated that they simply stop filling out the form. To avoid this, you can define conditions on your form pages and specify that the page should be shown or hidden based on the input that has been made into the form. As an example, let’s say you are creating a seminar registration form that asks attendees whether they want to include lunch in their booking. If your users answer ‘ Yes ’, they will be shown a page where they can pick out their lunch. However, if they answer ‘ No ’, this lunch page is not shown but skipped instead. In this way, the form behaviour is shaped by the input from your users. Read on to find out how you can show or hide your form pages based on user input. FIRSTSPIRIT_LINK

Use data sources to integrate data quickly and effectively as options for selection elements in your forms. The approach is the same, whether you have a drop-down list, or a single or multiple choice field. When users access your form, the data is accessed from the data source and applied as options in the form – without you having to create these options yourself beforehand. In the case of large datasets and data you often need in your forms, data sources also offer several other advantages. Avoid repetitive work You can use the same data from a data source in any number of forms, without having to store the data multiple times. Data updates automatically If the data in your data source changes, you do not need to update your forms manually each time. All of these changes in the data source are applied automatically to the form, because this data is only accessed when the user actually accesses the form. You can also use data sources for autocomplete functionality in the input field form element. If a data source has been stored for this field, users will receive autocomplete suggestions when they start typing into the input field. They can then select one of the autocomplete options to apply it and cut down their typing time. FIRSTSPIRIT_LINK

You are probably familiar with the situation where you are completing an online form and your browser starts suggesting values for fields like name, address, phone number, etc., which you then just need to confirm. So if you have entered contact details in a form like this one before, you do not need to enter them again.

Here you can find out how to display information that users enter into a form at another place in the same form. FIRSTSPIRIT_LINK As our example, let’s take a registration form for a marketing seminar, which asks the user to input various kinds of information, such as their email address, preferred seminar date and name. On the last page of the form, all of the data entered in summarised, accompanied by a short introductory piece of text. So, the idea here is to have the person who has just filled out the form mentioned by name in the introductory text as well as in the subsequent confirmation message.

Learn how to embed a form into your website in just a few steps.

After users submit a form, the default behaviour is for them to be shown a confirmation message. However, after a successful submit you can instead forward them to a landing page, where you can provide them with whatever information they might need. This immediate forwarding action can be defined in the settings areas of the respective form.