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Hi Awesome Airtable folks, 

I am a fairly competent basic Airtable user - basic integrations and data moving between bases, however not a full coder (so need an easy solution that is easily passed on to others please). I would love your advice on the best approach for this: -

We have an event, and we have 2 different H&S forms that we require our various stakeholders to complete. Each area (trade, volunteers etc) has its own base in Airtbale

Form 1 - Declaration
A simple airtable form, no images. Built in Airtable, communicates directly back to base. Worked well last time.
Completed by - trade only

Form 2 - Induction

  • Needs to contain imagery. This is where we came unstuck last year as Airtable Business doesn’t have imagery in the forms, so we built with an integration in Jotform. This created data and sent it back to the airtable base, but we struggled to integrate it with existing data so had to manually audit it.
  • We also have people attending who will complete this form that we do not have existing data records for - i.e. the individual staff of a stall holder, or a volunteer for a community group 

Completed by - trade, volunteers, staff

Really it is form 2 we need a fix for. The options seem to be:

  1. Upgrade to Airtable Enterprise? Unsure if the functionality is there or if the cost is worth while, but it would be ideal to stick with a single provider
  2. Rebuild the Jotform form with better integration - have data selection links that pull back to existing bases. However the issue of data collected from new poeple not already in our system still needs to be resolved.

Ultimately we want to be able to send these forms out, and with no extra steps be able to use our existing bases to audit who has and hasn’t completed them

Thanks for you help!

Your best bet for this is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable because it communicates directly with Airtable and can easily do everything that you requested.

Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to: embed imagery on your forms, update Airtable records using a form, create custom PDF files from form submissions, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, control access to a form via SSO or email domains, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Thanks ​@ScottWorld 

I have had a good play with Fillout and it looks great. The only thing I can’t work out is how to link my form to multiple bases - ideally I;d like the first question in the form to be

What are you ?

  • Trade
  • Volunteer
  • Staff
  • etc

Then have this link ongoing answers to a different base? 

Yeah I don’t think that’s possible with a single form I’m afraid.  As a workaround, maybe you could have one Fillout form for each base?  The idea would be to have a single form that asks what they are, and based on what they select (Trade, Volunteer, etc), redirect them to the appropriate form, which is set up for that base

Hello ​@WanakaShow,

You can design a form connected to Airtable with Plumsail Forms. This allows you to share it with users who do not have access to your base and add a link to a table to edit records directly from the Airtable interface:

Plumsail Forms has all features available on the free plan, so you can test it in full. You can add a logo, images, custom HTML and CSS—anything you need to customize its look and feel.

Regarding connecting to multiple tables, the best approach, as already mentioned, is to redirect the user from one form to a form connected to a specific table.

 

​@WanakaShow 

You have 2 different ways of doing this in Fillout.

But first, you need to setup a page on your Fillout form to ask the user to choose which one of the 3 different forms they want to fill out.

Then, you would either:

  1. Use a “display text” element to visually show the user the specific link onscreen that corresponds to the form that they just chose. Then, they would manually click on that link. (You would use “conditional hiding & showing” to only show them the link that corresponds to the form that they selected.) 
    or
  2. You would automatically redirect them to the proper form by creating an ending page that automatically redirects them to the proper form. However, in your case, you would need to create 3 separate ending pages, and you would use conditional page logic to determine which form to redirect them to.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Thanks for your help ​@ScottWorld and others, 

I was coming to the same conclusion, thanks for your help - I reckon I can muddle my way through from here

​@WanakaShow You’re welcome! Glad I could help! :) 

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

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