Help - My Form is Ugly... How to show DropDown as Grid / List within a Form?

[M_L]

I am attempting to create a SignUp Page in Airtable. My current iteration is live at this link. The form does meet the basic requirements I have, BUT the design/UI is lacking, especially the "Select Your Session" drop down.

Is there a way I can change the "Select Your Session" into a Grid View, List View Interface, or even a Radio Button List within this form?

Context: I'm trying to accomplish the SignUp process on an Airtable form because in addition to giving people a list of time slots to choose from, it enables me to prefill the guest's application number on the form (and hide it from the guest). This means the guest's application will be automatically linked to their session when they submit the SignUp form.

I don't know of any other way to accomplish this because, for example, an interface doesn't allow me to prefill the guest's application #. 

Ideas or input welcome!

TIA,

ML

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

Any form software will allow you to prefill & hide field values, including Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable and JotForm.

While both of these offer many different ways of displaying choices onscreen, if you need your form to display LIVE linked record values from your Airtable base (because those linked record values will be constantly changing), then you can only do that with Fillout. 

Fillout’s is 100% free and offers hundreds of advanced features that you can’t get with Airtable’s forms, but a linked record field would still need to be displayed as a dropdown menu.

However, with Fillout forms, you can choose to display as many fields as you would like for each selection in the dropdown menu of linked records — including displaying attachment fields.

So you could make each dropdown option much prettier by showing lots of different field values, including a photo/picture/image to go along with each dropdown option.

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

[M_L]

Hi @ScottWorld,

Thanks for your response, I appreciate the detailed overview. 

I am able to get the "LIVE linked record values" in my Airtable form right now, but the UI/Appearance is what's bugging me. I can check out Fillout to see if your tweaks would provide meaningful improvements, thank you.

On a related note, I'm guessing it's not possible to have my Dates field show as Single Select option either is it?

Thanks for your input, 

ML

[M_L]

Actually, your response is great. I'm toying around in Fillout now, and yes, it does already look significantly better than the Airtable Form I was working on. 

Thanks for the #protip.

-ML

[M_L]

Hi @ScottWorld,

I wanted to give a quick update. I built a form in Fillout which is looking great, however, I just learned from the Fillout team that they do not currently have a way to sort the items in the dropdown menu. My appointment dates are not in chronological order, and I can't change that. I confirmed with Fillout support that, as of today, there's no way to sort these items, and there's not a clear logic as to why they display in the order they do.

Fillout's UI looks really great! I may need to use Airtable forms for now until one with a better UI and sorting ability shows up.

Thanks for your responses.

ML

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

@M_L 

I'm sorry to hear that Fillout's technical support gave you incorrect information.

Even though they don't have a "sort" function, you can still sort linked record fields in Fillout!

You just need to create a new view in your Airtable base that is sorted by date, and then within Fillout, go into the Advanced panel on the right (for your linked record field), and choose to limit the selection by view.

Then, choose the sorted view that you created in Airtable.

You may also want to alert Fillout to this information, so they can improve their technical support.

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

[M_L]

@ScottWorld This is great, thanks for the good news :).

I did talk to the same Fillout rep and I think there was a communication mixup.

Thanks again.

ML