Seeking ideas and best practices for centralized intake form

MDabek

The communications and marketing functions at our company recently all merged into one large team. We're now working on creating a new, centralized intake form to capture all incoming requests. However, several functions (e.g., employee comms, graphics, events) have existing Smartsheet forms that they've been using for awhile (years in some cases). The existing forms and accompanying sheets only have about 30% overlap / similar fields, with about 70% of fields specific to the function.

Any ideas, suggestions, or best practices for merging existing forms into one form and/or creating a new centralized form that can accommodate a wide range of request types? We know we could use conditional logic to show or hide fields on a new form, but we're also trying to keep the back-end user experience in mind as well. We don't want the accompanying sheet to be chaotic and unusable. (Currently, the existing sheets have fields not included on the forms for tracking and reporting purposes).

Paul Newcome

My general rule of thumb is that intake sheets don't need to be "pretty". Usually I have my end users interacting with the data via reports and/or Dynamic Views to manage which columns are shown vs which are not based on role or user or department or whatever else, and I typically have them using Dashboards as their main entry into a solution. I tend to keep all but the bare minimum out of the sheets when I can to avoid people accidentally breaking things.

I would go ahead and say to combine them into one big sheet / form with conditional logic. You can rearrange the columns in the sheet so that they are grouped together based on the specific function, then shove all of the helper / calculation columns all the way to the right of the sheet (also organized by function).