Can I use Form collected Data to Pre-populate another form?

PaulPerger

I have created a Credit App for our company... The form works great for collection of data.

Once I have the data though, we need to follow up with Credit References, etc. What I would like to do is have a new form that is sent to someone to follow up with each of the references provided by our customers. What I would love is to have that present as a form showing the appropriate contact information from the database followed by questions to be answered by the references.

Unfortunately, while forms is great for collection of data, I can not find a way to provide SOME information in a form and then collect other information in that form. It seems a form is only useful to populate an entire row of information.

Paul Newcome

It depends on your automation settings. If you set it to unrestricted, you can send to an email address in a cell without giving them access to the sheet. You can also specify which cells are provided in the update request within the automation builder.

Paul Newcome

Would you want this updating the existing row from the first form entry or populating it as a second entry either in the same sheet or somewhere else?

PaulPerger

What I would really like to do is add data to the first entry. So for example, Company A completes a form and supplies an email to Reference #1, #2 & #3. (Each time a form is submitted it is assigned a unique identifier.)

I would like to use that submission to trigger an email to each of the provided Reference emails with a separate form that identifies Company A, collects the requested information from each Reference and then puts that information back on the original form's data.

Optionally, I have been exploring a second form that is tied to a second sheet containing Reference Responses. This too would work, except I am struggling with how to correlate the responses back to the original submission. I can then create a third sheet that pulls all of the data together into one location, but I have to have a single unique identifier on each database to properly associate the various sources of data.

I thought about using the email of the reference, but in our industry I will likely get the same references for multiple potential customers. I would really prefer to use the auto-generated unique identifier for obvious reasons, but I can not figure out how to send a form with data from a given cell on the database. As a very last resort, I can add the identifier to the email and ask the recipient to add that # in the first cell of the form.

Paul Newcome

I would suggest sending Update Requests to the references.

PaulPerger

I know I can request updates from users of Smartsheet to whom I have given access to my smartsheets, but in this case, the email will be sent to someone who is not a part of our company, and I have no means of restricting the cells an unknown person would be able to see...

Can an Update Request be sent to any email address? Smartsheet user or not? And can I restrict what cells such a person would see? I looked at this but don't see a way to send an update request as a "Form" with only certain cells visible to any address... Only to Smartsheet users.

Paul Newcome

It depends on your automation settings. If you set it to unrestricted, you can send to an email address in a cell without giving them access to the sheet. You can also specify which cells are provided in the update request within the automation builder.

PaulPerger

Thank You Paul. I just tried it using my personal address, and it worked fine. I wish I could change the Description, but I will just use longer, More descriptive Column Names so they make sense to the person receiving the email.

Paul Newcome

Happy to help. 👍️

PaulPerger

I have a follow up question related to the same form.

Can I add a Response date for each person who responds and updates the sheet? I am requesting three different people to update different sets of columns. Person 1 will update columns 10-15, Person 2, 20-25 and person 3, 30-35. I would like to add a response date for each of those column "sets" that will autofill when each person updates their portion. I know I can add a "Modified" date to the sheet, but can I add three modified dates that each refer only to updates from certain cells? (i.e. if a cell within 10-15 changes I want to change the Person 1 response date. etc.)

Paul Newcome

You can set up the three date type columns then set up three Record A Date automations. The trigger will allow you which columns should be monitored by the automation.

PaulPerger

That makes sense... So, I can set up an automation to put in a date when one of those fields is populated. Sometimes I try to make things more complex than they need to be!

Thanks again Paul.

Paul Newcome

Happy to help. 👍️