Formstack 101: Connecting Forms and Docs

in this video we are going back to square one with formstack forms and formstack documents and we are going to create a very simple document automation showing you just how easy it is to integrate these two tools so if you have never created a integration between forms and documents or maybe you've just never created a formstack document before this is the video for you [Music] hi i'm kyle the creator of no code collab a site where we have tips tricks and tutorials for your next no code project if you haven't already please like and subscribe to our channel and head over to our website where we have more code snippets and different things to help you with these tutorials before we get into the actual tools here's how this is going to work we're going to show you how to build a really simple form using formstack forms we're going to show you how to then build a really simple document building forum stack documents we're then going to show you how to hook the two tools up so that when your form is out in the wild and someone fills it out and hits submit that data is going to go from the form to the document and then that document after it's generated is going to be sent to you via email automatically so here you can see a little preview of the document that we're going to be creating inside of formstack documents it's really simple and that's intentional but don't let this fool you you can create some really complex documents inside of formstack documents you can have logic on which pages which sections you want to include you can have different tables you can have conditional showing and hiding of images so you can really do a lot of stuff with these documents for this tutorial we're going to try to keep it as simple as possible so you can see here we've got a movie title we have a release date a genre and a runtime so it is very simple now what we're going to do is we're going to create a form that is going to feed in the information to this document so we're going to need to create those four questions so that we can capture that information so i'm going to open up formstack forms i'm going to create a new form so you'll need to log in you're going to create a new form and i'm going to call this movie test and it's going to be in the uncategorized folder great so now i have the start of my form and all i need to do is drag in my questions so the first question was the movie title so for that i probably want a short answer question and i will just call this movie title then i'm going to go back and i need a release date so what i'm going to do is i'm going to find the date and the time i'm going to add that i'm going to drag that over i'm going to call this release date and i don't need time so i'm going to pull the time off i just want the date and the year okay now i've got a genre so let's just to keep this simple let's uh let's add a radio button because i can only have one genre and i'm going to call this genre and my first option is going to be drama comedy we'll go uh alphabetical and drama and maybe we'll do a third one which is uh thriller so we have three options there you can obviously add as many as you want if you want to add a new option you could do horror as well horror and then i'm going to drag that to make it alphabetical okay and now let's add the last one was runtime so i need to have a number so i'm going to add a number field and i'm going to call this run time and the format is zero decimal places the minimum value is going to be zero and maybe the maximum is going to be uh i don't know 204 that would be a long that would be a four hour movie i'm sure there's a four hour movie out there and then just to have some fun let's use a slider so that we can have us have a slider so that people can go back and forth one thing to know that i'm thinking about here on the genre is you could have used a you could have used a drop down list if you wanted to i'm just using a radio because then all of your options are right there and you just click it um but you could have used a drop down list if you wanted more than one option you could have used a check box but that's um so you've got options there so we've got our four questions set up if i want to view this live form i can see i've got my movie title which i can put in uncle buck the release date i think was august 16th uh 19 oh i'm gonna have to so now i can see i need to update my field here this was a comedy and the run time i believe was 99 minutes so one thing i'm gonna do now that i see that my my date picker is off i'm gonna go back and i'm going to update my release date and i'm going to go aloud years it's going to be current years plus 0 because i don't want any movies in the future or maybe i want to allow movies two years because they might be released and then let's say i want to go back 80 years okay so now i have if we view if we refresh this i should be able to see that i can go back quite a ways so i think it was 1989. so i did a little test on my form everything looks like it's it's running good now it's not hooked up to anything so submitting this form yes it will go to formstack forms and it'll go into my submissions in formstack forms but it's not going to send to my document so now let's head over to formstack documents and take a peek there so inside of my document once you're in i'm going to create a new document and i'm going to call this again movie test document document next and what i'm actually going to do is i'm going to start with a document that i've already created i like to do it this way because i find that the the editing and the authoring capabilities of word and powerpoint or in my case i'm actually using pages and keynotes i like those better than the online versions of those editors so what i actually like to do is create my document outside of formstack documents and then load it in so what i'm going to do is i'm going to head over to my document now and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to swap out my data for variables that i have made up so in this case this is the movie title so the way that you do variables in form stack documents are you gonna use a curly bracket a dollar sign and then you make up whatever you want so i'm gonna call this movie title now the way the reason that i am doing it i capitalize title and movie is that's called camel casing it just makes it a little easier to read but keep everything as one word for simplicity sake you could use underscores and things but we're going to head over now and i'm going to say release date and i'm going to call this we're going to call this dollar sign curly bracket dollar sign release date i'm going to call this one curly bracket dollar sign genre and now what i'm actually going to do with my run time so what's what's happening is on my form i'm just asking for a number so only a number is going to come through with that form so here i'm actually going to go like this i'm going to say run time and i'm going to call this run time and then i'm gonna have a space and then minutes and so it's gonna just insert that uh run time that that number right into this document so now what i've done is i've effectively taken my document and i've taken all the bits of information that i'm going to collect in my form and i've swapped them out for variables the variables could be whatever you want them to be keep them as one word or use underscores don't have long sentences don't have spaces just keep it short and concise have a naming convention because what's going to happen is as you're putting these variables in you're going to need to map them from formstack documents and once you have a hundred variables or 50 variables you're not going to reading a long sentence of variable names is is a pain and it's going to you're going to get cut off and you're only going to see a portion so keep them as concise as possible and something that is easily identifiable to the question that you're asking and that will make the mapping much easier so i've got my document now and all i'm going to do i'm in pages so i'm actually going to go file export to word and i want to export a docx or we're going to call this movie test a docx file i'm adding on my desktop so now i've saved that file when i come back here i'm going to choose my file i'm going to go to my desktop movie test upload that and you can see that my movie test is a docx file microsoft word i'm gonna hit next and i'm gonna now we're talking about delivery so we set up our document now we're talking about delivery i'm gonna send my document to an email address that's the default you could also send it to drive you could send it to other third-party storage solutions you could send it to signature formstack sign maybe hello sign some other docusign you can send it wherever you want after in this case all i'm going to do is send it to my email address and then i'm going to hit next and now we're talking about where we're getting the data from so i'm going to integrate with an external service that is form stack forms if i wanted to i could upload a whole csv a spreadsheet of all of my data or i could use a collection form where formstack documents will actually create the form for me now in this situation because i have such a simple form i probably could use the data collection form and then i wouldn't have to build out this integration but the collection form is very rudimentary it just is a bunch of fields where you just enter in data using formstack forms allows you to have logic and different pages and styling and so that's what we're going to do here now i'm going to click finish and now what i have is i have my movie test document so if i come up here to my tabs across the top this is just kind of a snapshot of what's been going on with my file how many merges i've had then i can manage my file where if you have an updated version of this file then you could upload it here or you could even dive in and you could look at the editing online if you want to make just a quick if you just want to make a quick edit so you can see here the line that i had is not didn't come through from pages so maybe i'm going to insert a i think there's a way to insert a horizontal line um maybe actually what i'll do is i'll just you know give it one of these so i'm inserting a horizontal line maybe i'll make it bold can i a little bigger okay so you can come in and you can edit right online in the uh in the cloud app maybe i want to make this a little let's make this a little smaller let's make this italic just so you know that you can actually edit in the online version of this tool so that is the manage file tab if you come over here to settings you can see what the name of your document is the output do you want to be word you want it to save as a pdf do you want to save this as an image so you've got a lot of options but then what you can also do is you can change the file name so when they create this merged document what do you want that file to be called and so in this case i want to call it the movie title so it's going to be movie test document movie title so movie test document dash uncle buck dash avatar whatever it is i'm going to set my time zone to just central time where i am and then you can also set your mode so if you're testing i recommend doing test mode so that these don't count towards your actual merges but you just flip it to test mode and then you can save the data for our case since it's so it's so simple i'll just keep it active the one thing that i do like to do when you're in your settings go to advanced settings and say use field map for custom integrations so do that and then save your settings and you'll notice that now we have a new tab on the top and what's going to happen is that field map is going to show us all the variables that we have in our document so if i click on the field map now what it's done is it's looked at the document that we've put in and it's told us oh you've got a movie title you've got release date in there you've got genre you've got run time that is looking in our document and showing us the variables that are in there if i were to come in here and i were to add a new variable say let's call this director right what's going to happen is in my field map you can see it's saved a web merge my field map will update and now i will have director in my field map now using the field map is a bit more of a custom advanced feature so we're not going to go into that but i always like to have that on because i like to see what's going on in my document in case i have a lot of a lot of variables so i'm going to head back over i'm just going to take out that director because we don't have the question for that save to web merge web merge is the previous version of it's it's what formstack documents used to be called so if you see web merge around web merge formstack documents same thing you can also see it in the url the url is still web merge okay so i'm coming out here i've got my field map if i want to i can test so i could actually enter in information on my movie title release date all that stuff it'll merge it and now i've got looking at my delivery tab so this is actually going to come to my work email but what i'm going to do is i could you could send this anywhere you could send this to a personal email address a different email address you could send this to a merge field so maybe you're collecting the email from the person in the form and you want to send that through you you could have your merge field be your delivery destination so that's that's really powerful as well so in this case it's going to come to my work email so then looking at merge merges some more advanced things that we won't go over today so you don't have to worry about merge for this more simple tutorial so let's just quick look at test let's try tests so we like we had uncle buck our release date i think was august uh was it 16 1989 our genre was comedy now i'm i'm writing whatever i want in here so this isn't held to my my radio buttons or anything this is just me i could put in gibberish here if i wanted to and then my run time was 99 so i'm to test my document and what's going to happen is it's going to go out and it's going to take these values and put them in where the variables were so now if i look at my document opening the document and you can see here i've got uncle buck so now because i tested it did have this sample in there and interestingly because i had the uh it looked like the the word document didn't have the the line but once it rendered it actually did so what i'm going to do is i'm going to head back into my source file i'm going to delete this and i'm actually just going to let's do a simple let's do this this underline again so that i know i can see it um so let's just do that and this is the thing with formstack documents it is so powerful and it's fantastic but what ends up happening is you do need to debug a little bit there's going to be things where you're like that's kind of weird and you want to come in and you want to look at the document you want to understand what's going on so don't be afraid of that if things don't go quite right look at your source file look at the uh look at the variables look at all the stuff and uh and and just kind of debug bit by bit so what i'm going to actually do is i'm going to export this again to oh i didn't want to do epub i'm going to export this again to word and i'm going to call it movie test and i'm going to replace my file now i'm going to come in i'm going to manage my go to manage file and i'm actually going to upload my new file and my new files movie test so it's a new version of this file and so now if i look at it this should be the version that i just added in there so now if we go test that again i could test this document and what's going to happen is the document is going to come out where i've got all of the things that i just added so now let's hook these two tools up let's hook up forms and let's hook up documents and be on our way so i'm going to head back over to formstack forms and i'm going to go to settings and on the left hand side there's this bit that says integrations and what i'm going to do is i'm going to add an integration to this form and it's formstack documents it's the big button at the top it's the it's right in front of you i want to actually turn this on what i need to do is actually go grab my api key you're going to come over and you're going to go to your settings in the top right corner and there's this thing called api access so you're going to click on api access you're going to click new api and it's going to give you these two values for the api key and the api secret once you paste those in the two things are now talking to each other so i actually just used the credentials from another form that i had already used so once you've done this once you should be able to just remember that api key and not need to re-enter it every time or create a new api key every time so i use those credentials those are all loaded in what i'm going to do is i'm going to choose a document to merge with and i'm going to grab my movie test document and what's going to happen is it's now looking at that document and it's saying what are the what are the variables in there we've got the movie title variable we've got the release type date variable genre variable run date runtime variable now all i have to do is map those fields so my movie title is going to map to my movie title question in formstack forms my release date is going to map to my release release date question now form stack forms and documents was smart enough to know that oh i've got a question called genre and a variable called genre i've got a question called runtime and a variable called rem time so it automatically did that so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn on my integration and everything is saved because it's saving automatically and so now my integration my my formstack forms and documents should be connected so what i can do now is i can go test so if i come back to my form i'm going to refresh it i'm just gonna call this uh let's do kyle's great movie and it was released on my birthday and it is a horror film that is running way too long 220 minutes 221 minutes okay so now what i expect to happen is i'm going to submit this form all of this information is going to be submitted because i just set up my api and my formstack forms and i integrated that and i mapped the fields what's going to happen is i'm going to submit it that data is going to be sent to formstack documents it's going to take those bits of information put it in where the variables are and then because i had my delivery set up to send to my email once the document is run i'm going to get an email that includes that document that's what i expect to happen it can typically take a minute or three for it to kind of all run through and into everything to work so keep that in mind but that's what i'm anticipating is going to happen right now so here we go submitting thank you the form was successfully submitted so it was about a minute or two later i just received this email and it included attachment an attachment called the movie test document what i'm going to do is i'm going to download that let's open it up it was kyle's great movie and let's see what it looks like kyle's great movie october 17th 1983 i said it was a horror and it was 221 minutes exactly what i put in on the form so this is again is a really simple example but what's happened now is i've created a form people have entered information they've hit submit and now to my inbox without me doing anything i've received a document that has that that data that information all cooked into the into the document so that is just the beginning you can make really powerful complex document automations using these two tools and the really nice part is all you needed to do was get the api key from formstack documents and put it into formstack forms and then you just map the two tools you map the fields if you were to use another form tool you would have had to go from that form tool to some other third party like zapier something else and then send from zapier then to formstack documents so there's another step but because you're using these two tools that are so tightly integrated it's so quick to create that tight data transfer so that is the real power of using these two tools together and i hope you can start to see the potential for how you can really easily automate your documents using formstack forms and formstack documents so i hope this tutorial was helpful if you have any questions please leave a comment or you can reach out to me via email and please subscribe to our channel check out our website and we will see you at the next tutorial [Music]

Channel: No Code Collab

Views: 698

Keywords: Document Automation, Formstack, Formstack Documents, Formstack documents tutorial, Formstack forms, Formstack tutorial, No Code, No code tutorial, Webmerge, formstack, formstack documents, no code apps, no coder, nocode tutorial, online forms, tutorial no code

Id: 8DyWJzPbMg0

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021