The Online Form Builder Blog

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.
8 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.
Be the first to post a comment!
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.
Be the first to post a comment!
Tags: mobile form

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.
13 Comments »
Tags: excel, form results, form to excel, form to pdf

Get Online Forms as HTML Email or PDF

The email format we use to send form responses 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.

Get Form Responses in Rich-Text Format

FormSmarts users now have the option to have form submissions sent formatted as a table in a rich text (HTML) email.

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.

View Form Responses Online or Get a PDF Report

Business-level customers may also view form data online and download a PDF report using the link located at the bottom of email notifications. In addition to form data, the online and PDF reports contain additional information about the transaction that is not accessible by other means. Additional information is currently limited to the IP address from where the form was submitted.

Note: This feature 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.

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

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

1. 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.
2. Sign up for a FormSmarts Pro or Business account and create a form with the form builder
3. In the Form Details screen, set the On Submission option to Show Confirmation & Integrate with PayPal
4. 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 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:

1. Position the quantity field immediately after the one listing products for sale
2. 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.

Posted on May 5th, 2009 in form builder.
27 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

« Older Entries Newer Entries »