Create and share forms to gather all kinds of information and keep that information organized within a sheet. For example, you can use a form to gather survey responses, purchase requests, or product orders. After you create a form, you'll be able to share it with people, and each form submission will be added as a new row to the top or bottom of your sheet.
Anyone who can access the form can use it to send information to the sheet.
Open forms in the mobile app for the best experience in submitting from a mobile device. Details on this are available in the following help articles:
If your goal is to give someone the ability to edit an existing row, you'll want to send them an Update Request. (See the article about Update Requests for more information.)
In this article:
- Create a New Form
- Distribute the Form
- More Ways to Manage and Distribute a Form
- Edit or Remove Fields or Other Items in the Form
- Add Additional Elements to a Form
- Control Form Display and Submission Options
Who can use this capability
NOTE: During a 30-day free trial, you can create, preview, and test a form, but you can't generate a public URL or embed code for it. These options are only available to licensed users.
Create a New Form
- Open the sheet that you want to attach the form to.
- Click Forms > Create Form on the menu bar at the top of the Smartsheet window.
In the form editor, you'll see the title of the form at the top and the names of all the form fields underneath. By default, the title of the form corresponds to the sheet name and the fields on the form correspond to the names of their associated sheet columns.
Each field will function similarly to its respective column type. See Use the Best Column Type for Your Data for more information about each column type.
- Click on an element from the left to display and edit its properties on the right.
- When you’ve finished setting up your form, click Save and Preview to save your changes.
- After you've previewed the form, you can close the browser window that it opens in.
- Click the x in the upper-right corner of the form editor to close it and return to the Forms window.
The name of the form you’ve created and its URL will appear in the Forms window. Once the form has been published, people will be able to make submissions to your sheet. Each submission will appear as a new row.
(Note that the URL is available only on forms owned by licensed users.)
Distribute the Form
Once you've created a form, you'll want to make it accessible to others.
Link or Email
To get a shareable URL link that others can use to access the form:
- Click Forms > Manage Forms on the menu bar to display the Forms window.
- From the Forms window, do one of the following:
- Under URL, copy and paste the URL to use it in other programs or email messages.
-or- - Click the envelope icon to the right of the URL to send the link in an email message.
- Under URL, copy and paste the URL to use it in other programs or email messages.
There isn't a way to customize or shorten the form URL using Smartsheet.
Embed Code
To create embed code and use that code to embed the form on a web page using HTML:
- Click Forms > Manage Forms on the menu bar to display the Forms window.
- Click the arrow next to More and click Get Embed Code.
More Ways to Manage and Distribute a Form
Once you've got the basic form set up, you can further customize it. Use the options in listed in the following table to help.
| Use this option | To do this |
|---|---|
| Create New Form (button) | Associate an additional form with the sheet. You can create multiple forms per sheet to collect different information, or display a different format, to different people. |
| Preview | Display a preview of your form. NOTE: Submissions made from preview mode will appear in your sheet as new rows. |
| Edit | Open the form for editing in the form editor. |
| More > Get Embed Code | Reveal the embed code so that you can copy and paste the form for use in a website. Available to Licensed users only (Not sure if you have a license? See this article). |
| More > Duplicate | Create an exact replica of the form, but with a new URL. |
| More > Properties | Show the form status, number of entries submitted, timestamp of first and last form submission, the email address of the form creator, and the date of creation. |
| More > Deactivate | Disable the URL (accessing it will display an error message), but preserve it and the form so that you can use them in the future. |
| More > Delete | Remove the form and its associated URL from Smartsheet. The URL is not recoverable. Delete forms with caution. |
Edit or Remove Fields or Other Items in the Form
- Click Forms > Manage Forms on the menu bar to display the Forms window.
- Click Edit in the form that you want to modify.
To remove an element from the form, select it in the form, and click Remove from Form (the x to the right). Note that this will not delete the column from the sheet. You can always add an element back via the Add Field section.
To change the placement of a field on the form, select it and drag it up or down. These changes won’t affect the order of the columns in your sheet.
As you edit the properties of each form element from the right side of the form editor, you’ll see the left side update to show the basic layout that will appear in the form.
At any time, you can click the Save and Preview button at the bottom to see the form.
Here's a summary of the different properties you can set for form fields.
| Use this property | To do this |
|---|---|
| Label | Choose to either use the column name or a custom label as the name of the form field. |
| Help Text | Add a description or instruction to appear underneath the form field. |
| Display Type | For Checkbox, Dropdown List, and Symbols column types only. Use this to specify how these are displayed in the form. NOTE: To change the field type and values, you'll need to configure the associated column from the within the sheet—that is, these properties can't be configured from the form editor. To make those changes, close the form editor and edit the column properties in the sheet. |
| Text Box Height | Set the form field to display as single or multiple blank lines. |
| Required Field | Required fields must be filled out in order to submit the form; leaving them blank will display an error message to the submitter. |
| Hidden Field | Hidden fields are not visible in the form, but are visible in the sheet. Use a hidden field when you want a default value to appear in a column of the sheet without requiring the form submitter to create it. For example, if you have a Submitted By field, you can set the default value to "form," and make it a hidden field. This way you can differentiate between rows that were added to the sheet by you and your collaborators, and those that were submitted via web form. |
| Default Value | Use this to specify a default value for the field. |
System columns and locked columns can’t be included as fields on a form. However, you can add system columns to the sheet to automatically track the date and time that the row was submitted via form.
Add Additional Elements to a Form
- Click Add Field in the lower portion of the form.
You can place the elements anywhere beneath the description at the top of the form. As you drag the element to the left side of the form, a dotted line will appear showing you where the element will be inserted.
- Choose from among the different options to customize the form as desired:
- Add a File Upload field to enable the form submitter to upload attachments to the form (up to 30 MB per file, 10 files per form submission).
- Drag an item from the Add Section Divider section to create structure and better organize your form with headings and horizontal dividers.
Control Form Display and Submission Options
To manage the form display and submission options, open the form in the form editor and click Form Options at the bottom of the editor.
You can choose from the following options.
| Use this option | To do this |
|---|---|
| Confirmation Options | Control what the form submitter sees after submitting the form. You can either display a confirmation message, reload the form so it can be submitted again, or direct the submitter to another URL. (The URL will load in the same browser tab. If the form is embedded on a web page, the URL will load within the embed window.) |
| Enable Confirmation Email | Add a Send me a copy of my responses checkbox to the bottom of the form. If the form submitter checks the box, they’ll be able to enter their email address and receive an automated confirmation email that their form submission was accepted. The email will display the actual data they submitted. NOTE: When a form submitter chooses to receive a copy of their submission, they may be challenged by invisible reCAPTCHA software that helps prevent auto-generated submissions. TIP: Though there isn't a way to have the form confirmation email sent to the sheet owner or collaborators, you can receive email alerts when new entries come in. (For more information, see Automate Your Work with Alerts and Actions.) |
| Location of New Entries | Specify whether rows inserted via form appear at the very top of the sheet or the bottom of the sheet. (There's not a way to have the rows inserted under a specified parent row or elsewhere.) |
| Style | There are three style options:
|
| Accessible by | Control whether your form can be viewed and submitted by anyone with the link or only registered Smartsheet users. With the latter option, anyone who navigates to the form URL will be prompted to log in to Smartsheet (if they aren't already logged in) before they can view and submit the form. In this case, if Enable confirmation email is selected, form submitters will see their email addresses automatically populated when they check the box to send me a copy of my responses. |
| Enable challenge/response for additional security | Use invisible reCAPTCHA software (appearing as a small footer at the bottom of your form) that helps prevent auto-generated submissions. A small percentage of form submitters may be prompted to prove they are not a robot by responding to an image based tile puzzle. NOTE: Invisible reCAPTCHA is blocked in China, so form submitters in China may experience issues if this option is enabled or if they’ve chosen to receive a copy of their submission |
| Advanced Form Options | Business, Enterprise, and Premier plans only. Uncheck to remove the Powered by Smartsheet messages from the form and confirmation page. |
If there's a Created by System column in the sheet, and only registered Smartsheet users can submit the form, the column reflects the email addresses of the users who submit the form. When the form is accessible by anyone with the link, the Created by column shows [email protected] (For information about System columns, see Use a System Column to Automatically Add Information to a Row.)