We have been working hard on a new version of the FormSpring form builder and are excited to announce many great new features and functionality. Most of the changes you will see will give you more flexibility in managing the look and feel of your online forms as well as providing your users with better usability. You can see some of the major changes in action by viewing a video recap.

Look and Feel

One of the first things you will notice is the appearance of your forms. We have updated the look and feel to give your online forms a little bit more style and have broken out sections a little more visibly, giving your forms a little more style and ease of use.

More Templates

We have added more stock templates for you to use, you can now choose from a wider variety of colors and designs. You can find the new stock templates in your Form Settings similar to the previous stock templates.

Form Builder

  • Multi-Column Forms: One of the biggest changes you will see in this release is the ability to create multi-column forms. You now have the ability to change the layout (bottom of your form builder) and create up to four column forms. You can also set the number of columns for individual sections.  The multi-column layout will allow you to have more control over your forms layout.

multi-column2

  • Copy and Delete Sections: Another big change, and one that should aid in building forms more efficiently is the ability to delete and copy whole sections.  Now when you duplicate a section you can copy all of the fields in that section. This is great when creating a form like an online order form for instance, where you want a shipping and billing section. Both sections have many of the same fields, instead of building both sections you can build one, then simply duplicate it and change the section title!
  • Callout on Supporting Text: A minor change but one that adds to the usability of your forms is the ability to add a callout to your supporting text. The callout uses a little “pop up” with the supporting text underneath the field with further instructions. This helps highlight the supporting text a little bit more and gives your users more direction when filling out a form.

  • Maximum Character for Text Areas: When adding a text area to your forms you can now enter a maximum number of characters for that text area. This allows you to control the amount of text submitted to your forms.  With this change, users will see the number of characters left on the lower right hand side of the text area.

Usability

  • Save and Resume: A popular request from many of our users has been the ability for their users to save and return to a form at a later date.  Your users now have that ability with FormSpring! On any multi-page form users will see a “Save and Resume” link at the bottom of each page.  Once they click on it they will receive a confirmation message and a link to return to the form to finish filling it out.  Users can then save that link and when they return to the form it will take them back to where they stopped filling in information. This is great for surveys, award nomination forms, job applications or other forms that may take some time to complete.

  • Graphical Date/Time Picker: Along with the changes in the look and feel we have added a graphical interface for Date/Time fields. Users can now select dates and times on your forms using this graphical interface as opposed to only the drop down/select list options previously used.

Template Builder

We have made some changes to the Template Builder. The first change is a usability change. We have added controls at the top of the template builder for quicker and easier changes to your style templates.

  • Background Image: You can now choose  a background image to use in your style templates. You can select those images by selecting “Background” and scrolling through the multiple images.
  • Change Supporting Text Color: Within the “Fields” options in your Template Builder you will notice that you can now change the Supporting Text field color. In the past you could not change the color.

Settings

  • Add/Change subject line in Notification Emails: In your Emails & Redirects settings you can now change the subject line of your notification emails (emails you receive when someone submits a form). Previously the subject was the name of the form by default. This is a handy, subtle change that allows you to make the emails you receive a little more recognizable. This also helpful if you have notification emails going to multiple people in your organization who might not know what the name of the form is.

Data

  • Display Latitude/Longitude on website for iPhone Submissions: For those of you who are using our iPhone App, you will now be able to see the Latitude and Longitude of submissions within the data page for users who submit data on their iPhone.  Simply click on the submission in the data area and click on the “Location” to see it.
  • Remove or Edit uploaded files individually: One problem that some users have had when creating file upload fields is that they want to edit or delete individual files to help save space or for other reasons. You can now do this easily by clicking on the submission, editing the submission and choosing to remove the file – you can do this for individual submissions without having to delete all of the submission.

Account

  • View and print old receipts from your account: You can now view and print your previous account receipts right within your account settings. You can see the receipts by going to your Account page and selecting the Billing tabs, at the bottom you will see a list of previous receipts and you can select anyone to view and print it. This will allow you to print out actual receipts as opposed to just your monthly (or yearly) billing emails.

Let us know what you think of all the new changes below in the comments or head over to our Forums and leave a note there!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 10:39 am and is filed under FormSpring News, New Products/Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.