Everything You Need to Know about Airtable Forms

if you're looking for help with air table forms you have come to the right place this video is going to be going into detail about the good and the bad of air table forms our table forms are really great because they give you a quick and easy way to set up an ability for other people to enter data it'll go directly into your database but they don't have the full functionality of a standard form software so understanding where these limitations are is really important for you when you sit down and start building your forms so if that's of interest stick around and let's get into it [Music] hey my name is Gareth Pronovost I'm the owner at Gap consulting where we help you to get organized and automated in your business and in your life so if that's of interest swing by our website I will include a link in the description of this video and learn how we do exactly that but without further ado let's just jump into the topic of this video air table forms so really quickly I'm taking a look at my screen here you'll see that I have built an example database with two tables I've got clients here and I have accounts receivable what I'm imagining is that you've got a form where you or you're gonna build a form that tracks your client data and tracks when you receive payments from those clients so let's take a quick look at how this client information might work I'll put myself as a guinea pig in this database so again this is the form is going to be for recording those accounts receivable so I'm not building a form for receiving the client data although I could just as easily do that as well but I'm for the sake of this just gonna type in my information here and imagine that I were a client for this this particular database or yeah a client so I've filled out my first name last name and email and then orders here or you know this is I should call this accounts receivable because that's the link and let's see if I can spell all right there we go so we've got our link to accounts receivable and we've so we've set up our first client and that's great now let's take a look at our accounts receivable so we've got a couple things working here and I brought in a lot of different data types for the exam of this so first and foremost we've got an auto number and then we have a link to our client then we're gonna record the amount that was received we're gonna record the date the payment was made the method of the payment and then also if it was a check we'll record a check number as well for tracking purposes this is just an example but the bit the bottom line here is I wanted to bring in a bunch of different types of data right so I've got a linked relationship I've got a currency data type I've got a date data type I've got a single select field and I have a number field I just want to I just want to make sure that we're looking at all the different types of data and how they work now you'll also notice that we've got an auto number here and we have an order number that's going to auto generate so if we did not build a form for this and we had to record this manually we would do the following we would click here and you see that the auto number fills out automatically and then the order number is actually a function of the auto number so it's taking out a number plus a thousand so this is just a way to create you know a nice number that's in the thousands to track each record not really critical for this but the reason that I've included an auto number here is because this is a dependent field and so is this formula and so when we go to create this form you're gonna notice that these are not options because these this is like metadata this is stuff that's going to happen regardless of what the client name is the amount received is the data payment all of that stuff so it's not going to be available to us on our form because of the type of data so let's go ahead and and build a form from scratch so we would click up here and where we have the grid view and the form is actually its own view type so we're gonna select form view and as soon as we do that this all gets set up now you'll notice that by default all of the independent field types are automatically in our form and so that starts again as I mentioned the formula that we built and then the auto number they're not pulling in here but everything else is the client the amount receives the data payment payment method now we can do a couple of things here first you know we can rename this form so I can call this this this is accounts receivable form we can put a description in here description example if we wanted to and this is a pro plan feature but if we wanted to we could add a logo here we could add a cover image here whether you're dragging some images from your desktop or you're finding them online however you're doing that but it kind of Gussie's up the form a little bit then importantly also we can come in and make certain fields required so in this case I would want to make sure that when somebody submits this form we're always capturing the client we're always capturing the amount received we're always capturing the date and we're always capturing the payment method now I don't want to make check number required because it's not always going to be a payment that was received by check right so this would be a nun or non-required and then also notice that for this specific type of data that is the single select field and this also applies for the multiple select field I can actually make the decision if I want to see this data as a drop-down so these are the three options credit card ACH or check or do I want to make it a list where somebody selects you can also limit the selection and so you can turn certain things off and you can say well this you cannot select ACH maybe from this form now of course I don't want to do that but just know that you have the option so that's the high level analysis of that air table form now there are let's go ahead and and just from this point check this form out Oh before I move on there are a couple of things that we can do with our form we can and these are a lot of Pro features but we can turn off that air table branding we can decide if we want to redirect to a new page after the fact we can you know all these different options down here most of these are you know again part of the pro plan you can also receive emails after someone submits a form etc just great ways to get a little bit more functionality out of that form but with that being said let's go ahead and check this form out now you'll notice this is really just the form itself we can drag these things around we can replace them and move the we can remove things from the form if we want to of course I want all of these data points they're all relevant and so that's it that's it for us from here we're gonna go to open that forum you can also go to share the forum and copy this URL if you're on the pro plan you can restrict access with a password or to a specific email domain you can also embed the form on your site so if you want it to embed the your contact form or something like that on your website you could do that and that data is gonna go directly into your air table database when submitted but let's let's imagine that we just want to open this form and take a look so again and this is this is a tricky part you know we can't actually access this form this is just the set up of the form when we're inside of this we can only submit to this form when we've clicked that special link that air tables created for us so from here you'll see that this is how we set up our form right these this is all the descriptions and everything that we put in there all the fields are required etcetera now from here we can do a couple things we can add a client we can you know submit an amount we can record a date for a payment we can select a payment method and once we're good from here we'll submit the form now as soon as that's submitted let's flip back into our air table database and here we are we see that that came in automatically now this is perfect this is coming in just as we would have imagined that auto number is going to instantly tick up one each time that order the order number itself is coming in as well and we have everything coming in as planned now this is a fairly excellent solution right the form comes in quickly and easily and as you just witnessed it came together in about five minutes would have been less than that if I wasn't doing explanations as I went but there are some things that you would expect from any form software and air table missus on a couple of these so let me address those all right number one is the ability to pre-fill data when you're filling out client or when you're filling out information on the form so why do you want to do this well let's say that you wanted to send each of your clients their own link that filled out with their own client information so instead of you filling this form out maybe your clients are filling this form out for you and when they go to the forum let's go ahead and refresh this form when they go to the forum you want it to already be filled out with their client information you can absolutely do that in air table this is called pre filling a forum and in air table they have a great support document on this so I just go online every time I never remember the syntax for some reason and I go to check out the air table forum or the air table support Docs and you'll see that what you start with is the air table URL so this is the link for your forum you start with this and then you have to add some special syntax to it a question mark then tell it what you want to pre-fill and then you start putting that prefilled data in so let's actually build this for each of our clients so I'm gonna build a unique pre-fill form link and this is going to be a formula and I'm gonna start off with a concatenate formula and just to start I'm just putting a placeholder in here and I'm gonna grab this URL for the forum this is the base URL this is your starting point I'm gonna grab this URL and put it in here so now what we have is a is a basically a just the same formula every time so when we add a new contact then that form will be the same but that's not what we want we want this to be unique for each one so now we need to bring in that air table syntax so that this form would pre fill so the first thing we need is a question mark then we're going to put in all lowercase that work pre-fill then a underscore and then we have to get the name of the field or fields that we want to pre-fill let's take a look at what those fields are if I flip back into accounts receivable I want to pre-fill the client field okay so I'm gonna go back into my clients here and I'm going to adjust this so again the first thing we want to do is a question mark then prief all lowercase then an underscore and then client now this is case sensitive so we need to make sure that we're matching the name of this field exactly in this case I have client with a capital C so I need to make sure I do that in my formula as well so far so good so I've got the form URL question mark pre-fill underscore client now I need an equal sign and here's where it's going to be different every time and I want to tell it the client that you're pre filling is actually the client name that's unique for each record the full name and so in here I'm going to put a comma and I'm going to say full name now this is not a hundred percent correct just yet but let's go ahead and take a look at it now you'll see that this is working fairly well but you see that the end of this is not included with that underlined and that is because inside of my client name I have a space and I have to account for this in order to get it to populate a URL because URLs any link cannot have a space in it so in order to do that let's get back into this and we're going to wrap the full name with an encode function there's whoops there's an encode URL component that we can apply to this so I'm just wrapping that full name with that and what that does is it winds up putting a % 20 anywhere that there's a space and that is going to solve the problem for us so now when I let's just add another fake client down here and we'll see that once the formulas had a moment to catch up that that's all going to be filled out so now we can present this particular URL to our client and when the client clicks on this link as I'm doing now it will be prefilled with their information so that's the first thing that every form software out there that's worth its salt will do and air table does allow you to do that but that takes us to number two and number two is hiding fields and this is a parcel hit for air table so what do I mean by hiding fields well when you build a form sometimes you want to capture data and hide the the field from the user so that they can't actually see or adjust anything there that is exactly what we're doing here so I would not want to create a form in air table and then send it to my clients because I don't want my clients to know who my other clients are and so this kind of breaks down for that very use case because even though this is prefilled with Gareth's information Gareth could come in here and X this out and then he gets a list of all the clients again and if you've got sensitive clients that you know and in most cases you probably don't want to make that information public this kind of breaks down normal form software's like Jacques form type form they will handle this for you automatically and so there are ways that you can pre-fill a client's information in other forms software and then hide that information so that the client can't go back and do this but it's not possible in air table now that takes us to the third one and the third one is where we build conditional logic now air table forms unfortunately at this time don't allow for conditional logic again there are plenty of form software's out there that do conditional logic is when you build rules inside of your form that say depending on this question other questions may change or evolve so for example if I had the ability to do conditional logic in air table I could remove check number as a potential question and only make it available when somebody says that the payment method was by cheque and then and only then would the check number field show up on the form conditional logic is not allowed or not made available to air table forms but again air table forms are not a form software it rather air table is not a form software it just allows us to build some really quick and easy forms so those are the three areas where forms you know an advanced form software needs to check all the boxes so again understand the limitations of air table forms when you go to build your own forms as always I hope you found that to be super helpful if you you'd like to learn more we have a lot of resources that we've put together on our site so swing on by and see how we can help we have a blog that includes free content every week we also built an air table free crash course that will get you up to speed in under two weeks and if you're looking for something more advanced you can book some time to have a discussion with me I will hop on a zoom call with you and we can talk about what your needs are and how our company might be able to help so if that's of interest swing on by look forward to connecting with you soon [Music]

Channel: GAP Consulting

Views: 46,685

Keywords: airtable, Gareth Pronovost, Airtable Consultant, Airtable Consulting, Airtable tutorial, Airtable walkthrough, GAP Consulting, Airtable forms, Prefill airtable form, conditional logic, hide fields in a form, build a form, create airtable form, airtable form tips and tricks, how to use airtable forms

Id: uYyVzOypUms

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 13 2020