"Other" option for "multiple select" field

[Linda_Bonder]

When using a form, I want to offer specific choices for students to choose from, but I also want to offer them to option to fill in some option that we haven’t thought of. (As in, “how did you hear about us? Internet search, friend, Facebook, other- tell us how”)
Thanks

• Linda

[Justin_Barrett]

Welcome to the community, Linda! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: While Airtable doesn’t natively support conditional logic that could make a text field become visible if the “Other” option is chosen, you can still put a text field as the next entry after that selection list, including a comment that the student should use it to explain their “Other” choice. They can still opt to leave it blank, though, so it’s a gamble. You could make it a required field, but then it would become a minor nuisance to those who don’t need it, so I guess you gotta pick your poison.

FWIW, there are third-party form tools that can integrate with Airtable, and which do support conditional logic. Check out On2Air: Forms by @openside if you want to go that route.

[Linda_Bonder]

Thanks, I’ll look at that.
(Just looked - it’s $24.99 per month, and we’re a non-profit, so we’ll have to find a workaround. Any idea whether Airtable has this feature on the docket? Can’t imagine I’m the only one who wants it. Thanks!)

[Nadia_Eldeib]

I’ve just run into a similar issue in which I’d like to add Other as an option for a form with a multiple choice select field type. Is this feature available? Any help on how to use it or workaround without additional cost or integrations is deeply appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[Justin_Barrett · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the community, @Nadia_Eldeib! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: I wrote up a solution to a similar problem a few months back:

Automation: Allow users to add new options to a predefined list via a form Show and tell

A question arose recently that’s come up a few times in the past: is it possible to give form users the ability to either pick an item from a predefined list or add their own “other” option, and have manually-added options actually appear in the list for later form users? For most of Airtable’s existence so far, this wasn’t possible (at least not without delving into the API, and even then I’m not completely sure that was doable). However, it can be done using Airtable’s automation feature. Here…

If you don’t want the manually-added “other” entries to be added for later users to choose, just leave out the automation part of the solution.

[Nadia_Eldeib]

Thanks, Justin! I really appreciate your help.

One other suggestion that a friend gave that I ended up implementing was to add a conditional follow-up question that’s a free response if the person selected “other” so they can describe why. One catch is that you have to frame that question slightly distinctly each time if there’s more than one in the survey, but it’s doable.

I think this is similar but maybe a simplified version of what you achieved in the “Option 2” you described for Linked Records (or maybe it’s the same, in which case apologies! I’m still pretty new to Airtable).