Building a form from scratch

When no starter is close enough, build your own. The builder is drag and drop; every field has a settings panel.

Adding fields

Add field inserts one. There are 23 types. The ones that do the most work:

• Text, number, date, time — the basics.
• Dropdown — a fixed list you type in.
• Connected dropdown — a list that comes from your live data, so it is

never a stale copy. See Live Data below.

• Photo — captured on the device, attached to the question it answers

rather than to a camera roll.

• Signature — drawn on the screen.
• Repeating section — one block of questions, answered once per part, per

employee, per whatever. Each instance can have its own calculation.

• Calculation — a formula over other fields on the same form.

Field settings worth knowing

Click a field to open its settings.

• Required stops submission until it is answered. Use it sparingly — every

required field is a place a technician gets stuck in a basement.

• Capture GPS Location stamps where the answer was given.
• Auto-fill linked fields pulls related values across when a connected

dropdown is chosen — pick the customer, get their address.

• Conditional logic shows a field only when another answer calls for it.

This is what keeps a long form short in practice.

Pages

Break a long form into pages. A technician on a phone sees one screen at a time, with a progress bar, rather than scrolling through forty fields.

Before you send it out

Fill it in yourself on a phone. Anything that annoys you will annoy a crew ten times a day.