The Form Builder Blog

Web Form Builder Upgrade

This release of FormSmarts introduces over one hundred improvements, leading to our most powerful, reliable and generous offer yet.

Important Reminder

Please add FormSmarts sender email formsmarts-noreply@syronex.com to your contacts, whitelist, or list of allowed senders and instruct any other form recipients to do so too. This should ensure your web forms are (and continue to be) always correctly delivered to your Inbox.

Increased Input Fields Allowance

To allow all users to take advantage of the new Heading and Text Block widgets introduced with this release, we’ve increased the number of fields you can use on a form.

• FormSmarts Standard users can add up to 15 fields on each form using their referral points.
• FormSmarts Pro users can add up to 75 fields on each form.

Be a Good Web-Citizen

• Report bugs. However intense our testing efforts before releasing a new version of the form builder, bugs may remain due to the number of different browsers and versions in use. Please report any suspected bugs on the forum or by email.
• Show your support. Whether you are a Standard user getting the web form service for free or a FormSmarts Pro customer paying the price of a business lunch for a year of service, please show your support by pressing the “Like” button on our Facebook page and following us on Twitter.

Major Changes

If many of the changes are improvements to FormSmarts server-side software which are not directly visible to you, all affect the quality of the service we provide you.

• Form data storage and Excel reporting are coming out of Beta, and you can now activate those for each form in the Form Details screen of your account.
• We’ve improved several aspects of the form creator’s interface.
• We now support headings and text blocks on forms; details in another post.

Posted on May 5th, 2010 in form builder.
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Tags: form to excel, input field, news, paypal form

How to Add Headings & Text Blocks to a Form

Headings

You can now use headings to create logical sections within your forms. For example, you might need a Contact Details or Past Employment section. To add a heading, select the Heading widget in the Fields tab of the form builder. The new field’s description will become the text of the heading.

Text Block Widget

We’ve also added a text block widget that allows you to insert text of up to 250 characters anywhere within a form. Example uses include:

• Instructions for individual form sections
• Question or sentence introducing a group of check boxes
• Disclaimer at the bottom of a form

Text Blocks support some text formatting (bold and italics) and — most importantly — links.

To add a text block to a form, select the Text Block widget in the Fields tab of the form builder. We’ve increased the maximum number of fields that can be added to a form to allow all users to take advantage of this new facility.

Links and Formatting in Text Blocks

You may sometimes need to insert links in a form. For example, to provide a link to your terms of service or privacy policy, or to refer to an external document within a form. The form builder now allows you to insert links and specify bold text and italics in Text Blocks using the following wiki-style syntax:

• Links open in a new window
• Linking and formatting constructs can’t be nested. So, you can’t have a link in bold or text in bold and italics.
• Check out this example.
• Links and formatting are available with FormSmarts Pro and FormSmarts Business plans.

Give Feedback!

We welcome your feedback about headings and text blocks. If you would like to give feedback about (or suggest we add) another feature, visit the forum on our Facebook page. We read and reply to all posts.

Posted on May 5th, 2010 in form builder.
2 Comments »
Tags: input field

Changes in Form Builder Payment Integration

The recent upgrade introduces some changes in FormSmarts Payment Integration (PayPal Form) feature.

• Chargeable items may now be placed in check boxes. This should prove valuable in situations where you’re building a form with one or several optional, individually priced items.
• Payment button instead of link. We’ve replaced the payment link on the confirmation page by a more outstanding button.
• Form ID now shown in PayPal report. Up to now, when you needed to reconcile a payment with the corresponding form submission, you could only rely on the FormSmarts Reference Number. This is the unique ID shown in the subject of emails containing form data and in Form to Excel reports. The same ID appears in the payment details in your Paypal account, and also in the CSV report you can generate. We’ve now added the Form ID (see screenshot) to the information available on PayPal, so you may quickly identify which form each payment is for.

We warmly welcome your feedback.

Posted on May 5th, 2010 in form builder.
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Tags: payment integration, paypal, paypal form

New Form Templates: Tooltips, Mobile Forms,…

We’ve upgraded form templates over the last few days. This affects the look and feel of all web forms. Notable changes include:

• Tooltips — A help icon next to text fields now shows the field’s description and validation information on hover. You may want to review the field description you provided at the time you created your forms.
• Variable form width — The width of embedded forms can be resized down to 360px without side-effects, and should degrade well beyond that.
• Mobiles forms — Although our forms have always been accessible to mobile users, we now provide a specific template for standalone forms accessed from mobile devices. If your site visitors include a fair proportion of mobile users, you should also provide a link to the standalone form whenever you embed a form on your site.

If you installed the form embedding code on your website before August 2008, you should upgrade it to benefit from the new features.

Important: We’re now publishing most updates via our Twitter and Facebook pages. Please subscribe for updates and service status information.

Your feedback is most welcome.

Posted on September 18th, 2009 in form builder.
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Tags: mobile form

Web Forms to Excel

Stored form submissions and export to Excel® allow FormSmarts Pro users to aggregate form submissions on FormSmarts, and download a report at their convenience in Excel format.

You can activate Excel reporting for each of your forms in the Form Details screen of your FormSmarts account. If you’re not yet a FormSmarts customer, find out more about forms to Excel.

You will then be able to easily create Excel reports from stored form responses in a few clicks with the report generator.

Upcoming Features

The following features are scheduled for release in the coming months.

• Text Blocks in Forms. Insert blocks of descriptive text in your forms
• Teamwork Support. The workload is shared between multiple email subscribers: form submissions are sent, in turns, to each member of a team.
• User-Selected Form Recipient. The form recipient is selected by the user among a list of registered recipients, e.g. Sales, Billing, Webmaster.

Posted on July 8th, 2009 in form builder.
9 Comments »
Tags: excel, form results, form to excel

Get Forms as HTML Email

The email format we use to send form submissions is flexible and supported by all desktop, web-based, and mobile email clients. Plain-text emails however become tedious to read and process for long forms and when form results must be printed for processing, e.g. for mortgage application forms, quote request forms, and many types of forms in the insurance and real estate industries.

FormSmarts users now have the option to have form submissions sent formatted as a table in a rich text (HTML) email. Depending on interest, we may also start to send form results as PDF attachments.

The main advantages of HTML emails are:

• Form reports are shorter
• Look is more appealing online and printed
• Email addresses, web links, and callto links (e.g for Skype) will launch the relevant application when clicked, as long as the field type as been set correctly.

To start receiving form results in HTML, change the Email Format to HTML Email in the Settings tab of your account. This option is initially only available to FormSmarts Pro members, but we plan to extend it to all users if there is demand, and pending review of performance implications.

We welcome your feedback about the ability to get form submissions in HTML format.

P.S. We will soon allow text comments in web forms,… stay tuned.

Posted on June 4th, 2009 in form handler.
6 Comments »
Tags: email notification, form recipient, form results

Send Form Results to Multiple Email Addresses

We’ve updated FormSmarts form builder and form processing back-end to allow several email subscribers for each form. We’ll be releasing more subscription mechanisms later this month.

Before using an email address as a form recipient, you first need to add it to your account, and verify it. You can change the recipients of a form in the Form Details screen of your account.

The number of email subscribers allowed for each form depends on your plan.

Posted on May 31st, 2009 in form builder.
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Tags: form recipient, form results

How to Build a Paypal Form

FormSmarts PayPal Integration is your best option when you need to collect data and get a payment on a form. It makes it very easy to include a PayPal payment in your forms, while giving you the power, flexibility and ease of use of a full-featured web form builder.

For example, you can easily build:

• an event registration form (registration form demo)
• a booking form (booking form demo)
• an online order form (order form demo)
• a service request form
• and any other web forms which you want to integrate with PayPal

Tip: The demos above are hosted on FormSmarts, but you can also embed forms on your own website with the code snippet given by the form builder.

Do you need help integrating PayPal into your form?
Ask a PayPal Integration Expert Now

Requesting a Payment on Your Form

To requesting a payment on a form:

1. Sign up for a FormSmarts Pro account and create a form
2. Set the Return URL of the form to http://www.paypal.com
3. Add radio buttons, a drop-down list or a checkbox, and enter the description and price of products formatted as My Product Description ($30 USD), as shown on the screenshot below.

That’s all you need to do. We’ll pick up the products and quantities that were selected, and we’ll redirect the user to a pre-filled page on Paypal for payment.

Billing Multiple Items on One Form

You can as easily charge for several items within a single form submission by adding other drop-down lists or radio buttons formatted as just described.

Adding a Product Quantity Box

If you’re building an order form, you will need to allow the user to enter the quantity or number of products they want to buy.

This can be done as follows:

1. Position the quantity field immediately after the one listing products for sale
2. Set the field type to Positive Integer.

Handling International Payments

To request a payment in a currency other than US dollars, simply change the currency code in the item’s description. For example, use (€60 EUR) to receive a payment in Euros, and (£60 GBP) for a payment in Sterlings.

The link inviting the user to proceed to payment is displayed in his preferred language, in any of the supported languages.

Reconciling Form Results & Payment

The name and email address submitted as part of form data may not always match those in the Paypal account that was used to send the payment. You will then need to reconcile each form submission with the corresponding payment using the FormSmarts reference number.

The FormSmarts reference number is the 25-character ID that is given to users on the confirmation page, and is shown in the subject of the email notification we send you. The same reference number will appear in the payment details in your Paypal account (Transaction Details screen, under the Custom heading).

How Payment Integration Works

In the current implementation, your Paypal email address must be the same as your FormSmarts login. You can change your FormSmarts login if needed.

To avoid the user having to type the same information twice if paying by credit card, we will attempt to pass on his first name, last name, email and country to Paypal. If you intend to request this information on your form, make sure you name the first name and last name fields exactly like this.

The web form and Paypal integration feature is only available to FormSmarts Pro customers. Lean more about FormSmarts Pro.

Redirecting Users to Your Site After Payment

To redirect users to you website after they have completed payment, log in to your Paypal account, and set the Return URL under Profile > Website Payment Preferences.

Get a FormSmarts Pro Account Free!

If you sign up for Paypal with a premium or business account (it’s free) with our referral link, we’ll refund your FormSmarts Pro subscription as soon as we get an equivalent referral fee from Paypal! See Paypal conditions here.

We welcome your feedback about payment integration.

Posted on May 5th, 2009 in form builder.
16 Comments »
Tags: payment integration, paypal, pro, return url

Personalize the Confirmation Message Shown After a Form Submission

You can now personalize the confirmation message that is displayed after every successful form submission.

To personalize the confirmation message for a form, visit the Forms tab of your account, and edit the form’s details. This feature is only available to FormSmarts Pro users.

Important note: All default messages shown during form submission are localized. If you change the confirmation message, users will see your personalized message instead of the default confirmation message in their own language.

You can always revert to the default confirmation message by erasing the text in the Personalized Message box.

We welcome your comments about this new feature.

Posted on April 11th, 2009 in form builder.
1 Comment »
Tags: form submission, international, pro

Attaching Multiple Email Recipients to a Form

With the new version of FormSmarts, Pro users can now subscribe to form results using one or more of the following mechanisms:

• Email subscription. Subscribe one or more email recipients.
• Stored form results. Aggregate form submissions on FormSmarts, and
  download them later as Microsoft Excel documents.

A notable change is of course the ability to send forms to several email addresses. The allowance of one email recipient per form for users of the free service stays unchanged.

The new subscription mechanism should best fit the needs of most users. We welcome your feedback about this development.

Posted on January 20th, 2009 in form builder.
2 Comments »
Tags: form results, pro

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