Form View

Accumulating data on your base doesn't always have to be done by you or your team. You may often need to collect data from those who are not a part of your organization.

E.g., job applications, event registrations, customer feedback or inquiry generation, and even ideas for a new project from your team.

With Zoho Table Forms, you can create forms to suit your requirements that integrate seamlessly into your workflow.

This article aims to provide a step-by-step explanation of the Form View functionality in Zoho Tables as follows.

Create your form
Customize your form
View how your form looks
Share the form with your audience
Track the form responses

Create a Form

Creating a form starts with figuring out the basic structure - what information you want to collect from the recipients. For example, if you own a store and you want to know about your customers' shopping experience and feedback, you may need to ask questions such as their name, email, what impressed them most, what might need improvement and any other feedback they might have.

For any given table, the default view on Zoho Tables is the Grid view. The main advantage of creating a form in Zoho Tables is, you can create a new form view with your grid.

To convert the fields in the grid to a form follow the below steps:

Each field in the grid is considered to be a question in the form. Add your question in fields - one field is limited to one question.
Choose the appropriate field type. Say you're collecting email address from your audience. In that case, you should set the field type as Email.
Now the questions and the right field types are set, you can convert your grid into a form by clicking the + button next to Views in the tool bar and choose Form.

Edit fields in the form

In addition to creating your questions in the fields of grid view, you can further add or delete questions directly in the form view if needed.

On the right pane, click on fields that opens a form builder which displays the questions you have configured in your grid.

To hide or unhide the questions in your form, use the toggle button next to each one of those fields.

The Hide All and Show All options let you hide/show all fields in the form at once.

If you choose to add more questions to your form, you can directly do that in the form using the +Add Field option in the form builder.

To Edit a question in a field, click on the ⁝ icon next to the question and click Edit to make the changes.

The Menu in each field also has the following options:

Duplicate: To create a copy of the field

Duplicate without data: To create a copy of the field without the data

Delete: To delete a field

Hide: To hide a field

You can also edit a question by clicking on the field in the form. Also to make a question mandatory, use the Required toggle button.

Customize your Form

The Design panel on your right lets you customize the look and feel of your form to suit your audience.

You can set a Title and Description to your form. With the Show Title toggle button, show or hide the title and description. The Title Size option lets you set the size of your title to small, medium or large.

The Label Alignment lets you align your field labels to the Top or Left. The Color Theme option lets you set a background color of your choice in your form.

Set a custom message for your audience at the end of the form. By default, the message is set to 'Thank you! Your response has been recorded'. You can set a message of your own within 150 characters.

Using the toggle button - Redirect to an external link - redirect your user to a URL of your choice once the form is submitted.

View how your form looks

Once your form is built, see how it looks to your audience by clicking on Preview at the top toolbar. This helps you make sure your form works just the way you want it to.

Share the form with your audience

Your form lets you share a unique link with your audience. Click on the Get Form URL option at the top right panel, that opens up a dialog box with a link to copy and share.

This Share option also allows you to choose who gets access to the form. You can choose between the following options:

Anyone in this portal

Anyone with the link

For password-restricted form sharing, enable the toggle button "Restrict access with password" and enter the password of your choice.

To set an expiry date for the form, select the toggle button "Set form expiration" and pick a date of your preference.

The Restrict Multiple Responses toggle button lets you restrict multiple responses from a single user.

By clicking on the Disable Share button, you can disable your form from receiving responses rather than deleting it once its purpose is achieved.

Track the form responses

The final step is to know how to view responses from your audience.

Zoho Tables saves you from manually storing the data from the responses. By default, all the responses will be saved to the grid that you used to create the form.