Importing Fields From Excel

Created by Anthony Young, Modified on Tue, 14 Jun, 2022 at 10:30 AM by Anthony Young

When you need to create a big form with many questions, it can be time consuming to build all of these in our Form Designer.

In most cases, the form that you are creating already exists as a Word or Excel file that is being printed out.

That file contains all the questions' text and ordering, often with other bits like formulae.

For these cases, our Import Fields function makes it fast and easy to get all the questions into your Form design.

Getting Started

To use our Import Fields feature, follow these steps:

1. Download our example Excel template.

This is found in the Form Designer. Launch the Import Fields popup by clicking on the IMPORT button.

Tap on the "Click here" link in the description text and you will get a full example Excel file in the required format.

2. Edit the template to add in all the fields you desire.

Often this involves cutting and pasting the question text from your existing Word/Excel form.
Make sure that you set the type of field against each question.
Set whatever relevant properties as needed by entering values into the designated columns.

Important notes on template editing:

Do not leave empty rows between your field rows.
Do not change the order of columns or add others!
The template format is fixed and you will run into errors if you alter the columns in any way.

3. Save your template and import it into the Form Designer.

In the designer, click the Import Fields button on a Form that is in Draft or Test status.
Select your Excel file from step 2 above.
The system will import your fields and display these on success.
Otherwise you will see error messages explaining the problem.

Note that your new fields will NOT be saved by the import process.
This allows you to edit the fields in the designer before saving, but more importantly it means that any mistakes or problems introduced by your import can be forgotten by simply browsing to another page in the website.

That's all there is to importing Form fields from Excel.

This is an extremely rapid way to get Forms prototyped and also massively reduces the time spent on mundane work like creating many questions in a Form.

Template Columns and Acceptable Values

Our template file contains a number of columns, each one for a specific field property.

Note that this is not all the available properties found in the Form Designer - it is a subset of the most commonly used ones.

As such, you will probably need to tweak some fields after importing into the Designer.

A full listing of each available column/property and accepted values is provided within our example Excel template.
Acceptable value are case-sensitive and must be match EXACTLY as specified below.