New! Add real-time validation to fields on your form

Hi Community,

We just enabled a forms enhancement that many of you have requested: field validation.

You can now add real-time validation to Text/Number fields to help collect error-free numbers, percentages, email addresses, and phone numbers. Email validation is also available for Contact fields. 

We think this will be a particularly big time saver for you if you currently:

• Manually review form submissions in your sheet for errors
• Use formulas in your sheet to check for invalid responses
• Have automated workflows that require consistent, error-free form submissions in order to be triggered at the right moments

Our form validation is extremely easy to set up.

While viewing your form in the form builder, click on a Text/Number or Contact field to open the Field Settings panel. Depending on the type of field you clicked on, you’ll have one or more validation options. Simply select the one you want to apply to the field. For phone numbers, you can also select the default country. Once you save your form, the validation you added will immediately start working.

When someone fills in a field with validation enabled, here’s what their experience will be:

• If their entry is valid, they won’t notice the validation at all.
• If they try to enter an invalid character (such as a non-numeric character in a number-validated field), they simply will not be allowed to do so.
• If their entry does not match a required character pattern (such as too many or too few phone number digits for the selected country) and they move the cursor’s focus to somewhere else on the form, the form will display an error message below the validated field. It is not possible to submit a form with validation errors.

As a best practice, you might want to add help text to validated fields (e.g., “Numbers only”). The help text option is also found in the Field Settings panel.

Here’s the form validation help article if you want to review all the details.

We already have a lot of ideas for how to further enhance validation in the future so this is really just the beginning! Let us know what you think and what else you’d like to see. Thanks as always to everyone who submits feedback and requests for forms — we appreciate everything you send us.

-Caroline