Best Of

@Megan_ClavieParker & @Anais,

There's unfortunately not a perfect solution for this but you can implement these strategies:

• Use restricted dropdown lists when reasonable to do so,
• Use an Update Request to send the submitter a form to update their information when errors are made
• For phone numbers there is a built in validation option

A word/character limit would be super helpful for data analysis.

I am supporting a team with a solution for their quarterly reporting. Every campus has a variety of programs and some programs overlap across multiple campuses. We love that forms has logic so that we don't need to make individualized forms for every campus/program combo. We also love that we can use this in combination with dynamic view so that campus outreach officers can review what has been submitted. We then love DataMesh to support our tracking of which teams have completed their work and which have not, which impacts their funding. All of these save us time.

However, we found that programs input far too much information in the forms regardless of noting in the description that there is a character/word limit. This makes it difficult to view and analyze qualitative data submitted. Due to the lack of this feature, this team is being pushed to look toward other survey platforms for this work.

We need the ability to limit characters for situations like generating documents. If a user enters too many characters the data runs off the page or information that isn't needed is provided.

I would appreciate your upvotes and hopefully this is a simple update. 🙂

This is why we haven't move to document generator

Currently, I have a form where users input a project description that is combined with a project number to be used for the file name. Since Smartsheet has a 50 character limit for file name, the project description portion has to be limited to 30 characters to allow for the 20 character project number portion. The solution I have come up with is to put instructions on the form for users to limit the description to 30 characters and warn that anything longer than that will be cut off in the project name. The formula that generates the project number and description just takes the leftmost 30 characters of the description. But users frequently forget to check the length since there is no visual indication that what they've typed is longer than 30 characters (not to mention it's rather time consuming to manually count 30 characters and prone to error). Having an alphanumeric column type that could be set to a certain length or either have a way to validate the number of characters in a form would be extremely useful.

Yes agreed, top of sheet would be preferred.