The Acrobat.com Blog

We feel very lucky to be hearing from all of you about what you need in a good cloud-based forms authoring and distribution service. As you may have read yesterday, we’ve recently been able to implement several brand new features that you have been asking about for some time. In several installments over the next week or two, we’ll take a closer look at these features and what you can now newly do with Adobe FormsCentral!

New feature #1: Page Skip Logic

This addition was one of the features most often requested on the forum and through e-mail feedback to the team. Until now, respondents have had to go through all questions on a form, and in some cases, only a subset of respondents would need to respond to all of those. Thus, you may have been required to include apologies like “If you answered yes to the last question, go to question 3. If you answered no, go to question 4.”

No longer! Now, with either the Basic or the Plus plan, you can add rules to your page breaks that allow questions to be skipped altogether. Let’s try an example: imagine we want to create a conference registration form. At this conference, only those guests who choose the Premier and Speaker options will be offered meals. Therefore, though everyone will provide a name, address, and registration type, only those who choose Premier and Speaker will be offered a meal choice; speakers will also be asked to provide some extra information. FormsCentral Product Manager Randy Swineford recommends that you “create all of your pages and questions first, then set up up the rules; when setting up the rules [which will tell FormsCentral which pages to skip] you’ll need to reference existing questions and pages.”

Once you’ve created all the pages that a respondent might need to use, select the page break that separates one set of questions from another; you’ll see a “Navigate to page” option appear as a fly-out menu in the margin. When you click in the check box, a dialog box will appear, and this is where you define your page skipping rules. Coming back to our example, we can tell FormsCentral that any registration that isn’t “Speaker” or “Premier” can go directly to page 4; meanwhile, all speakers will go to page 2 (to provide special speaker information) and premier registrants will skip to page 3 (where they will choose a meal). Here’s what the dialog will look like once you’ve set your conditions:

And that’s it! Now your respondents will only see the questions that they absolutely need to answer. Moreover, this feature can be applied retroactively to forms you’ve already created, so you can add some logic to your old forms as well as your new ones.

Stay tuned for next week’s examination of FormsCentral new data summary charts! For now, try out Page Skip Logic for yourself: https://formscentral.acrobat.com/CreateAccount.html