Select multiples in either a drop down or check box on a form?

rbrunettiSTEQ

I am working on a customer survey (form) and would like the customer to be able select multiple items in a drop down or have multiple check boxes available in a single column?  Is this possible now?  Is this in development?  I know there a couple of ways to work around this but nothing very elegant comes to mind.

It's possible that this functionality is available now, but I am very new to smart sheet (2 weeks) and haven't found it as of yet.

Thanks in advance,

Rich

Andrée Starå

Hi Rich,

Unfortunately, it's not possible yet, but it's a great idea!

Please submit an Enhancement Request when you have a moment.

You must use the workarounds.

Have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

Paul Newcome

Andree is correct. You will need to use one of the workarounds. If you would like help setting one up, let us know. Between Andree and I, we both have a few pretty easy to setup and use workarounds that may fit your particular case.

rbrunettiSTEQ

Paul,

I'd like to take you up on your offer.  Below is an example of what I would like to do on the form:

Q: Water Types Used

(select up to 3)

• Potable
• Purified
• WIFI
• RO/DI

 

The only workaround for this that comes to mind is listing each of the selections separately with a Yes/No or checkbox available.

 

If you can come up with something to streamline my workaround, please let me know.

Rich

Paul Newcome

Unfortunately the best suggestion I can make is to use separate checkbox fields. The biggest drawback to this is that you have specified to only select 3, but they would be able to select 4.

 

Another suggestion would be to make it a free text field and have them type in manually which ones. Again, no data validation within the form to limit it to three.

 

To avoid the no more than 3 selections limitation, you can create a form in Google Forms (very simple to do) and build the validation in there. You can then very easily link it to your Smartsheet which will collect all entries on a sheet. 

 

I believe that Google Forms would also allow for multiple selections within a field, but it has been a while since I have needed to use this.

 

Once the sheet is populated, if you were wanting to combine all entries for a submission into one cell for display, this could very easily be done even if the entries are in separate fields.

 

What is your end goal with the information being collected from the form entries?

rbrunettiSTEQ

Limiting it to 3 responses in not a deal breaker in this, I can include something like that (if required) in the help.  

I don't think I quite understand what you mean by separate check box fields.  If that is creating a separate column for each choice, I do, and that is what I'm trying to streamline.  I'd rather see it show up on the form with one heading/question and then have multiple checkboxes available below it.  If that is what you mean, then I need instruction on creating it.

Alternatively, I can do this on Google Forms as you suggest.

The end goal is to collect data from the client for use in starting our PM of the production process.  This data is used to evaluate client needs we need to serve and technical issues we need to address.

Paul Newcome

If you set the sheet up with separate columns for each of the four options, you can include instructions on the form in the "Description" section of the Title Bar.

 

The first screenshot is building the form, and the second is what the for would look like.

 

Is this something along the lines of what you are looking for?

rbrunettiSTEQ

Nice!  That is perfect. 

Thanks

Andrée Starå

Hi Rich,

To add to Paul's excellent advice, you could use the JOIN function to collect all the types together in one cell.

Hope that helps!

Have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

Paul Newcome

Thanks Andree!

 

Rich,

 

Andree's response depends on exactly how you are planning to use the data derived from the form submissions. If you are using each option to drive different results, then we won't need to JOIN them together. We can use the raw data from the form submissions as is.

 

However... If at any point you plan to display the selections in a clean format, that's when we would JOIN everything together. Depending on how clean you want it to look when displayed, there are various options for that part as well.

.

Andree,

I'm not sure how much you've played with joining the data together to be displayed, but I came up with something you might find interesting (instead of laying all out here, I went ahead and created a thread for it):

 

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/joining-results-boxes-checked-entry-2-solutions

Andrée Starå

Paul,

Nicely done! 

Best,

Andrée

Paul Newcome

Andree,

 

Thanks. If you can think of a way to make it work even better, feel free to pick it apart.