I have a long detailed form I fill out every day, and sometimes (like just now!) I hit the mouse or the wrong key or something, and I mistakenly leave the page…and everything I have input on the form disappears.
Is there a way to get a form to “save” while you’re working on it, so that if you do something stupid as I have done, you don’t lose the info you’re already input?
For instance, would there be a way to add “Save” buttons at progressive places on the form?
Many thanks for any ideas, Gregg
Should anyone else be having similar issues, I found a workaround:
Instead of using a form, use a new view of the same table for what would have been each row of your form.
Make the first cell in each new view the date/time. Use the same interactive filter for “Today” for each new view to ensure that in every view you are adding new input to the same row of the table.
Although it’s a little less elegant than a form, it works very well and in some ways feels like it gives you a little more control over your input and the table itself; for instance you can expand cell for additional text entry options you could not do within a form and you can customize size the width of a cell to fit better than within a form.
I hope this helps others.
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Hey @Gregg_Stebben !
Im a teacher and used Coda forms extensively in my teaching this past year. I ran into this problem often as I had students who worked very slowly and would not finish their form questions in time (often times reading comprehension questions)
What I would tell them to do is press submit, no matter how far into the form they were. Then directly below the form I had the form results but it was only showing one cell, and I took away the column headers and the lines, and I used a filter formula to ensure that each user of the doc only saw their row (First question in each form asked for name, aka the person filling out the form selected themselves in a people column)
The one cell that was showing was a button that said “edit my answer” and used the Activate(thisrow) formula.
It would then pull up in detail mode their entire answers (just ensure that you use the same layout on that detail as the form itself)
This, from a user perspective, “saved” their answers right where they were at in the form and allowed them to continue working on the form as before! Hopefully that helps. Happy to provide example doc if my rambling doesnt quite cut it.
That’s very smart!
I did the kind of thing, using date and time as the first row.
I like the idea of using detail mode, I had not thought of that, I will check that out!
In case it’s useful for you, I used different views of table mode to essentially recreate each line of the form.
It’s not a pretty as a form, but actually gives the experience of filling out a form but actually adds some functionality that’s not available as a form. (I realize that added functionality is probably not relevant for you and your students).
I also like your idea of removing the column headers and lines, I will try that too!
Thank you!!