Archive for the ‘form builder’ Category
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Web Form to Excel
Stored form responses and export to Excel allow FormSmarts users to collect online form responses on FormSmarts and download a report at their convenience in Excel format.
Activating Form Data Storage for Export to Excel
Export to Excel requires that data storage be enabled for each of the forms for which you would like to be able to access form responses online. For privacy reasons, data storage is disabled by default. To activate stored form results and allow Excel reporting, visit the Form Details screen of each of your forms for which you would like to access form responses online.
You will then be able to easily create Excel reports from stored form responses in a few clicks with the report generator. Business-level members may also view individual form responses online and download a PDF Report.
Excel Report Generator Settings
Show Field Names in the First Line
If checked, the first line of Excel reports will show the name of each field. This option is enabled by default.
Week Starts
The report generator allows you to specify the date range over which a report is generated by either picking a start & end date or choosing a preset period of time (This Week, Last Seven Days,…). For the time periods that depend on the first day of the week (This Week, Last Week), we use the default first day of the week for your country (as set in your account). You can change this under More Options.
Time Zone
Preset time periods, date ranges and the form submission timestamp shown in Excel reports are now using your time zone (as defined in your computer settings). If you would like to generate a report using a different timezone, select the relevant city in the Timezone drop-down list. Note that the city selected by default may not be your city of residence, but it will be a city in the same timezone.
Importing an Excel Report
If an Excel (CSV) report contains text in a language other than English, you may need to change the character encoding to Unicode (UTF-8) in Excel’s Text Import Wizard, as illustrated below. The report may not display correctly for languages other than English unless the encoding is set to Unicode (UTF-8).
Posted on July 8th, 2009 in form builder.
15 Comments »
Tags: excel, form results, form to excel, form to pdf
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.
2 Comments »
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 online 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 subscription form for recurring payments (PayPal subscription demo)
- a PayPal donation form (donation form demo)
- 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 a form on your own website with the code snippet given by the form builder.
Do you need help making a PayPal form?
Ask a PayPal Integration Specialist Now
Requesting a Payment on a Form
To requesting a payment on a form:
- If you haven’t got one, create a PayPal account. You’ll need a Premier or Business account to be able to receive credit card payments.
- Sign up for a FormSmarts Pro or Business account [1] and create a form with the form builder
- In the Form Details screen, set the On Submission option to Show Confirmation & Integrate with PayPal
- 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. Payments will be sent to the PayPal account matching your FormSmarts login. You can change your login if needed.
Billing Multiple Items on a 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:
- Position the quantity field immediately after the one listing products for sale
- Set the field type to Positive Integer.
Creating a Subscription Form with Recurring Payments
A subscription involves a recurring payment at each billing cycle until the subscription is canceled. This article discusses how to create a subscription form. Recurring payments can also be used to allow the buyer to pay in installments. A payment by installments is a recurring payment where the number of payments is fixed. The syntax is Payment in 12 Installments (12x$9.99 USD/month). See this sample form.
Building a Donation Form
FormSmarts Payment Integration also supports PayPal Donations. To create a donation form:
- In the Form Details screen of the form builder, set the On Submission option to Show Confirmation & Integrate with PayPal
- Add a field to your form with the field name formatted as My Donation ($ USD)
- Set the field’s data type to Number
- Set the field’s widget to Text Box.
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, (£60 GBP) for a payment in Sterlings, and ($60 CAD) to request a payment in Canadian dollars. Note that the 3-letter currency code is required because a currency symbol may be used by more than one currency. For example, USD, CAD, and AUD will all use the dollar sign ($).
The text of the button inviting the user to proceed to payment is displayed in his preferred language, in any of the supported languages.
Reconciling Form Responses & Payment Data
With Advanced PayPal Integration, the order form is only sent to the seller after the payment went through. However with the Standard PayPal Integration that comes with FormSmarts Pro, the seller has to manually reconcile order forms and payments.
If the name and email address submitted as part of form data don’t match those in the Paypal account that was used to send the payment, you will 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 PayPal form / PayPal integration feature is only available to FormSmarts Pro and FormSmarts Business members.
Redirecting Users to Your Site After Payment
To redirect users to you website after they have completed payment, visit the Form Details screen of the form builder and set the Return URL of the form to you site’s URL.
We welcome your feedback about payment integration.
Footnotes
[1] Business accounts include both the standard PayPal integration described on this page and advanced PayPal integration. Pro accounts only include standard PayPal integration.
Posted on May 5th, 2009 in form builder.
31 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
How to Create Multi-Language Forms
We’ve now released the first international version of FormSmarts. Form users now see instructions, error messages, and confirmation messages in their preferred language. FormSmarts is already available in 24 languages, and more translations are under way.
The languages supported are: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish. If your language is not listed and you are willing and able to translate FormSmarts into your language, sign up here.
Other changes worth mentioning:
- Create forms in any language. Because of the character encoding that was used, web forms could before only be designed using a West-European language. FormSmarts now supports all languages.
- Now using ISO date format. The date format accepted was changed to the ISO format YYYY-MM-DD. Note that because most users enter dates with a date-picker, the impact of this change is very small in practice. The format used on the confirmation page and in email notifications has not been changed.
- New form URL format. The default form URL format was changed to accommodate forms which title is not in English. The previous URL format that was based on form title is still supported for backward compatibility.
How the Form Language is Selected
Each time a form is loaded, FormSmarts customizes it based on the language preferences set in the user’s browser. Common text, error, help and confirmation messages will be displayed in the form user’s preferred language, not necessarily in the language you used to create the form. For example, if you built a form in English but some of your visitors have set Spanish as their preferred language, those users will see the form questions and the text you entered in English, and help and confirmation messages in Spanish.
Setting the Form to Use a Specific Language
Dynamic language selection explained in the last section provides the best user experience in most cases. This approach however becomes awkward when the main language of the form and the preferred language of the form user employ a different reading direction. If you have built a form in a right-to-left (RTL) language (Arabic or Hebrew) and expect all form users to understand that language and a number of them to use a browser set to a left-to-right (LTR) language auch as English, then you should set the language of the form as explained next.
Dynamic language selection most-usually provides the best user experience and we recommend against setting forms to a specific language except in the case discussed above.
To set the language of a form to a specific language, set the lang parameter of the form URL to the ISO code of that language. So if the URL of your form is http://formsmarts.com/form/lqh and you would like to set it to always display in Hebrew, you would need to use the URL http://formsmarts.com/form/lqh?lang=he or change the URL in the form snippet published on your site to http://formsmarts.com/form/lqh?mode=embed&lay=1&lang=he.
Give Feedback
We welcome your feedback about this new version of FormSmarts. Please report any problems you may find.
Posted on November 30th, 2008 in form builder.
2 Comments »
Tags: international, web forms
Calling Embedded Form Users!
Form Widget Size Calculation Upgraded
To accommodate users who need to create forms with a large number of fields, we’ve recently introduced a much more sophisticated way to calculate form widget size. If forms on your site currently display a scrollbar, we strongly advise you to upgrade the form embedding code.
Refresh the Code on Your Website When You Add a Field
Once you have inserted the HTML code for the form widget on your site, we cannot resize it at our end. That means that whenever you add more input fields, you must refresh the code on your website. If you don’t do it, a scrollbar may show up, and some users may not be able to see the bottom of the form.
Space at the Bottom of Web Forms Is Normal
The spare space at the bottom of web forms is there for a reason: leaving enough space for error messages that may occur during form submission. Here again, if you remove that space, a scrollbar may show up, and some users may not see the bottom of the form.
Optimizing form widget size is not a simple issue because it depends on the rendering characteristics of the diverse web browsers, as well as on the different aspects of each form. If you believe the size of a form you’ve created is not optimal, let us know.
Posted on August 15th, 2008 in form builder.
No Comments »
Tags: widget
Form Color Settings
Like many FormSmarts users, you may sometimes want to customize the style of your web forms. This may be because you want the forms to match the rest of your website, or because you want a form to stand out on a web page.
The form builder now allows you to change the text and background color of your forms. Visit the Form Details window in the Forms tab to set color preferences for a particular form.
Things to note:
- color settings only affect embedded forms, not forms access by their FormSmarts URL
- because your color settings are stored in our servers, you can change settings and see the result immediately. You don’t need to update the form code on your website.
How to Change Form Colors
- By default, form text is black, and form background is transparent. This should fit the needs of most users, and if you’re happy with this, you don’t need to do anything.
- If you do want to change a color, the easiest way is to choose one of the popular colors we’ve preselected. Just click on the color you want.
- If you prefer to use your own colors, you may type any valid 6-digit HTML color code directly. For example, 808080 is a shade of gray.
Usability Note
It’s important to preserve the accessibility of your forms to visually impaired visitors, and their usability under poor reading conditions (e.g. bright sunshine). Always keep a high color contrast.
Posted on July 6th, 2008 in form builder.
7 Comments »
Tags: embed, form builder, usability, web forms, widget
Form Owner Verification with Google Page Creator
To verify you own a website, we ask you to create a file with a specific name on your web host. If you use Google Page Creator, proceed as follows to verify your site:
- create a new page
- enter the verification file name (e.g. syronex8800…2523.html) as the page title
- publish the new page
Form ownership verification is optional but recommended to build trust with your visitors. It is required you intend to advertise a web form URL by email.
Recent Issues with Google Page Creator
Although hundreds of Google Page Creator users have successfully verified their site, we’ve had a few issues in the last few days. Google was redirecting some of the requests to googlepages.com to the same page on google.com, thus preventing us to check the verification file exists. We obviously have a limited scope for action, but we identified a likely cause and took technical measures that seem to have solved the problem. Leave a comment if you experience any more problems.
Posted on July 2nd, 2008 in form builder.
1 Comment »
Tags: embed, form builder, google page creator, widget
Ever Wished You Could Reorder Fields?
The set of form-making operations supported by FormSmarts form builder was up to now almost complete, allowing to:
- create a form
- delete a form
- edit form properties (name, title, return URL, form filling instructions, recipient email account)
- add a form input field
- delete a field
- edit field properties (name, description, field type, input widget, optional/required)
The last unsupported operation was to allow users to easily change the order in which fields appear on a form. This is often needed to:
- group fields logically
- group optional fields together at the bottom of a form
- insert a field in a existing form
- move fields around to increase the visual appeal of a form
Reordering fields manually is tedious, as it involves deleting and re-creating fields.
No more. Reordering fields is now a trivial drag & drop: in the fields tab, drag the field you want to move, and drop it in the position you want.
As usual, we welcome your comments and suggestions about this feature.
Posted on June 20th, 2008 in form builder.
5 Comments »
Tags: form builder, form design, input field