Saving form data

​@resources 

That feature is natively built into Airtable’s forms.

If a user closes a form while filling it out and then comes back later to that same form in the same web browser, Airtable will remember what they filled out before.

Sometimes Airtable has a few glitches on attachment fields & linked record fields, but in general, it should work perfectly fine.

However, for even more reliability & even more advanced capabilities with your forms, it is typically recommended to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, because it communicates directly with Airtable, it automatically saves partial responses as your users are filling out the form, and it even allows you to have multi-page forms & collapsible sections — both of which are great for lengthy forms.

Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, pre-fetch dynamic data from an Airtable record, customize the style and branding of your form, customize a theme for your form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, add a login page to your form, perform math or other live calculations on your 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:

• Using Fillout to update an existing Airtable record & create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
• Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

If you need your users to come back to the same form on multiple different devices, then you would need to build a customer portal.

Airtable offers a portals feature, but it is extremely expensive and requires a minimum of 15 users. So you would probably want to turn to a 3rd-party portal instead.

The most popular 3rd-party portals that are currently available for Airtable are:
Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, Glide, and MiniExtensions.

I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.

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

If your users are accessing the partially filled form on the same device and browser, then using an Interface form works fine with this:

Note that this is different from a Form View, which does not save partial submissions:

If you want users to be able access partial submissions via different devices you’re going to need to use third party software of some sort as well as a login system I’m afraid

In addition to answers above, do note that if you are working on a Fillout update form, then you could just have them submit the form at any point in time (assuming no required fields) and this information will not only be stored on the form itself, but also on your airtable base!

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join our Airtable Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

​@TheTimeSavingCo This didn’t work for my colleagues, although it worked for me.

I find it best to conceptualize Airtable forms more as a way to input a whole record at once than any kind of particular interface. If your users are internal and have seats, I would say a dedicated Airtable interface is probably better for this. 

If you have outside users then I'd really consider my form if it’s so long that they can't fill it in one go, and I would probably move over to Fillout. With Fillout you could actually have two forms, one to do a quick submission that sends an email with the link to the longer version for them to fill out at their leisure. 

Hm, if they were using the same device and browser to access their previously keyed in data and nothing showed up you’ll want to open a support ticket with Airtable to see what they can figure out I reckon

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If this is urgent, then I’d suggest going with ​@DisraeliGears01‘s advice about either moving them into an Interface if possible or using the two forms with Fillout

​@resources

Yeah, if you’re experiencing bugs with Airtable’s forms , you’ll definitely want to use Fillout to workaround the bugs. In general, Fillout is the way to go for Airtable forms.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant