Best design for long forms with logic?

Matt K

Hi,

The ability to use forms and the logic options are really amazing tools. I see how the use of forms can increase the productivity of my team and eliminate a lot of emails back and forth with our clients.

One use case we have is that there is a form currently in an excel format that is lengthy and comprehensive. I've been transposing this excel sheet into the Form with logic that Smartsheet provides. There are multiple categories and may require one person to complete all items or different teams to focus on their specific categories. The problem is depending on what the client's requirements are 25% of the questions may not be relevant for their system, so it's just a waste of time and to do this manually for every customer (hiding the questions that are not relevant) will be too time consuming.

I want to design this the right way using forms and logic. The logic helps the client focus only on the questions relevant for their system. The current problem is that the form does not allow you to save, then pickup where you left off at a later time. The excel survey would have 7 different sections with roughly 20 questions in each section. The "Update Request" doesn't send the form with the logic and requires manually removing columns you don't want someone to see that are in the sheet. Otherwise, that would be a viable option.

I'm debating between these two options:

1. Create a single sheet with separate forms (maybe 7 or more - one for each group of questions) to break up the long form. Designing the questions so that the logic is only needed within that single form and has no dependency on the other forms.
   1. This requires duplication (the person completing the form would need to put their name on each form, they would enter their company name on each form)
   2. A new row is created for each form submission.
2. Create a separate page for each group (7) ; create a form for each page.
   1. Create an 8th page to aggregate all responses from each form into one view. Possibly one row.
   2. Same as above. This requires duplication (the person completing the form would need to put their name on each form, they would enter their company name on each form)

Does anyone have similar requirements for their forms? Can you share your experience and lessons learned?

Matt K

Update on this. We've decided on Option #2. We will create separate pages for each form, then use a report to pull in the consolidate view if needed for each client. It would be great there was some intelligence to link forms and the logic from one form to the other, but honestly this wouldn't be needed if there was a "Save" option for the form for the client to go back to complete at a later time.