Web Forms

Mrs H

Hi,

I wondered if anyone can help me with the following web form queries:-

• Is there a way of showing, on the Smartsheet, the text you enter in the ‘Help Text’ field in the web form?
• If you are awaiting responses from a certain number of people, how can you monitor which are still outstanding?
• Can you prepopulate these people in the primary column?
• How can you send reminders to people who haven’t submitted their web form (but not to those who have)?

Thanks in advance.

Andrée Starå

Hi,

Please see answers below.

• Is there a way of showing, on the Smartsheet, the text you enter in the ‘Help Text’ field in the web form?

No, not automatically but a workaround could be to add it to the Column Description in the sheet if that makes sense.

• If you are awaiting responses from a certain number of people, how can you monitor which are still outstanding?

There are a few different workarounds, but it sounds like it would work better with Update Requests instead. Would that work?

• Can you prepopulate these people in the primary column?

Not in a general form but it's possible to include the information in a link. It sounds more and more that Update Request would be a better solution because then you can include that information.

• How can you send reminders to people who haven’t submitted their web form (but not to those who have)?

There are a few different workarounds. I now think that maybe you mean the Update Request feature. Are you? It sounds like that would be better for your needs.

Hope that helps!

Have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

Mrs H

Thank Andree, I’ll have a play around with those options, particularly the Update Requests.

On the first one, I was really looking for a way to be able to report the detailed questions in my Forms, in Power BI and, if I use the column description box I’m not sure that is possible.

Andrée Starå

Happy to help!

Regarding the detailed questions: I would add separate columns for those questions.

Would that work?

Let me know if I can help in any way!

Best,

Andrée

Mrs H

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I can’t get my head round how I can make it work.

Essentially I want to ask a series of questions which all have Yes / No answers in the form and get about 40 people to respond.

Then I want to report the results of each question in Power BI.

My problem is, I can’t work out how to get the detail of the question into the Smartsheet.

I wonder if I need 1 Smartsheet for the questions and 1 for the answers.

Best Wishes

Jennifer Greenough

Hello,

I realize this may be heresy on a Smartsheet forum, but for a survey with complex questions and simple answers (which is what it sounds like you want), Smartsheet may not be the right tool. You might consider a survey tool and then you can import the answers into a tool such as Smartsheet or Power BI, for sharing results.

Smartsheet forms and update requests work pretty well when you have simple questions that can be contained in the column titles, but once the questions get long you reach a limit, as you've pointed out already. Another option is to use one column for the question text and another for people to input the answer (Q1 Text, Q1 Answer). There is a lot of information on the Tableau forums (and I imagine on the Power BI forums) on setting up surveys and survey analysis, although it seems like your data set will be relatively small so you have a fair amount of flexibility on the back end.

Smartsheet does pretty well on graphing in Dashboards, and you can do that upon import of the information. We have incorporated answers to surveys in our other Dashboards when we have things that are important to highlight in a spot people already use for other things.

Jennifer

Andrée Starå

I'm always happy to help!

How did it go? Did you get something working?

Best,

Andrée