Create a form - Smartsheet Tutorial

- [Instructor] With Smartsheet, you can create forms to make it easier and faster to collect data. After creating a form you can share it with a web link, so team members, clients, or anyone else can easily submit information and files that are collected and saved directly in your sheet. You can create forms for things like event registrations, customer feedback, surveys, and more. Let's start by creating a new form. I'll click the plus button to go to the solution center and I have an Excel file we can import that has some column headers already created for us. Selected here, it's O3 O1 Project Request Form and I'll just shorten its name here. And I'll leave everything else the way it is and click import. All right, so let's say we're creating a form that customers or potential customers can use to request design work for my company. You can see this sheet already has columns in place to store data like their contact info, their project description, their company size, and so on. Having some columns already created before you create your form can make it easier to put the form together, but it's not necessary to have a column for everything you want before you start your form. You do have to begin from a sheet though. To create our form, we'll choose forms, create form. That opens up the form editor. And by default, the form uses the same title as the sheet, but you're free to change it if you want. Right now it's just Project Request Form. Let's change this to Red 30 Project Request Form. I'll leave the description blank for this example. So here we see a preview of the form fields that have been automatically generated from our column headers. You can modify each of these fields with the custom label if need be. So for example, with the name field selected here, maybe I'll change its label to First and last Name. Each field can also include help text, which will appear below the field label. So for this name field, we might type, "please enter your full name." And as you can see, we see a preview what this will look like as you make changes. Now what you see here on the right side of the form editor is determined by the column types you assigned in the sheet. Right now all of these fields are regular text fields, so as I select each one, the options here on the right don't really change. Let's click save for a moment and I'm going to go back to the sheet. Just close that for now. And I'm going to quickly go through and set a few column types. For example, I'll double click the email column and we should set that as a contact list. I'll select the start date and set that as a date column. For company size, I'm going to choose dropdown list. And down here at the bottom I'm going to enter values for the list. Say 1 to 100, 200 to 499, and 500 plus. And in the returning customer column, I want to be able to note if this person is a previous customer. I'm going to set this as a checkbox column and I'll just choose the star symbol in this case. Okay, so now that we've defined the columns, let's go back to creating the form and see how it's affected our options. I'll go back to forms, manage forms this time and I'll select the form we started. So the name and phone fields are still regular text fields, but when I select the email field, we lose the display as options because we set this up as a contact list field. Notice if I select phone again, we have this display as option here, but I want to select email, we don't have that. Now we can still customize its appearance. Maybe I want to add the help text of required. This way the user knows they have to add an email address to the field, but to actually enforce this, I need to actually select required down here. Notice that places an asterisk by the field label. Now the start date is now a date field. So instead of a field where they can just type text, we actually have a date picker, so they can choose the start date from a calendar. Now the project description field is still a text field, but describing their project will probably take more than a single line of text. So here I'll select Multi-line text box and you can choose how many lines of text you want to display at once. Maybe I'll make this four lines. And if it's longer than that, the box will be scrollable. I can also enter a default value here that can provide further instructions or examples. And we can see that the company size field is a dropdown list. You can choose to display this as a dropdown list or as radio buttons both in vertical and horizontal configuration. In this case, I'll leave it as a dropdown list. Now the last field is the returning customer field, but let's say this is more for internal use. I want my team to use this field, but I don't want it on the form itself. You can remove any fields from the form by clicking the trash button. Now that only removes it from the form and not from the sheet. Notice it still appears here as an available field that I can add to the form here under fields. All right, so that's how to create a form using the columns in your sheet as a starting point. We'll continue adding to this form next.