William Lau, Senior Product Marketing Manager

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Well, don’t wait by the phone any longer. Everyone, you’re hearing it here first: Email notifications have arrived to FormsCentral. Let’s say that again, a bit differently: When new responses are submitted to your form, you’ll get an email notification. No more waiting in the browser, refreshing your screen every two minutes.

Can you hear the cheers? We sure can. This has been the most-requested feature from day one of FormsCentral’s existence; you’ve written us emails, called us, tweeted at us, and commented here on the blog, wondering when notifications would be included in the service. Today is the day, people! Now, if you’ve got a Basic or Plus subscription, you (and anyone you’ve shared your form with) can individually elect to be sent email notifications whenever the form has a new response.

Not only can you request an email notification for a new response; you can also ask that the response data be included in the body of the email so you can take a quick first look at the submission before diving into the full response table. You can also forward these notifications along if the submission contains data you want to share immediately. What if, for example, your sales team uses FormsCentral to collect leads? Maybe the Sales Manager is the one who gets the notifications, and she can simply forward the notification email (complete with the lead form’s information) to the relevant account manager. Nothing could be more convenient.

We’re sure that this new inclusion of email notifications will do a great deal to improve your workflow with FormsCentral. Welcome to a simpler, quicker, and more fluid way to collect and respond to data.

Check in later this week to hear some more about what we’ve added to FormsCentral this month – there are more treats to come, and we can’t wait to share the new features with you. For now, head over to FormsCentral and enable your notifications in any paid account! http://formscentral.adobe.com

Click on the name to be taken to a sample form:

Surveys

Market Research Survey
Customer Satisfaction Survey

Applications

Grant Application
Employment Application

Educational forms

College Class Enrollment

Quiz

Marketing forms

Sales Lead Form

We also updated our “360° Feedback” form and our “Concept Testing” form, so be sure to check out those templates as well.

We make these templates available to help you jump-start your form creation process; now, when you have to create an application for a new position and post it on your company’s website, you can just sign into FormsCentral, click on the “Templates” tab, and create a new form from the “Employment Application” website. All you need to add is your company logo and any specifics that you need from the applicant.

Have you been using templates in FormsCentral? How do you feel about our new forms? Are there any that you’d like to see included here? Let us know by commenting below! To form your opinions on using templates to create your forms, sign in or sign up at http://formscentral.adobe.com

Date: August 10th, 2011
Time: 10:00 AM US Pacific (1:00pm US Eastern)
Location: http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/acrobatusers/

Hope to see you there!

Now, one of the great joys of collecting data (if you ask some people) is the thrill of the analysis: Who’s saying what? Where does the data skew? How many people prefer cats to dogs? Apples to oranges? One of the quickest and easiest ways to get answers to these kinds of questions is to create a chart or aninfographic so you can simply glance at the overview without needing to do too much intellectual legwork. Recent updates to FormsCentral have provided you with an automatic way to create these charts for your data with Summary Reports; without doing a thing, you can view your data as appealingly colorful charts. These charts are generated automatically and update as new responses come in from your open form. Here are a few highlights of what you can do with these charts:

1. Customize the layout

When you open up the “Summary Report” tab in a form file, you’ll immediately see automatically-generated charts of all of the questions in your form. You can add or remove these report tiles by deleting them (notice that little trash can icon)…

…and adding in specific chart pods by going to “Insert” > “Individual report tiles” and choosing the question for which you want to display data.

2. Customize data view

When you’re ready to get more granular, click on the gear icon in one of the individual charts; you’ll get a fly-out menu that will let you determine exactly what kind of labeling and data you want visible in a given chart. You can choose between seeing a percentage marking, a response count, or both; you can choose whether or not to include a caption; you can even add a footer to summarize the source data. The chart’s data display is entirely under your control.

3. Choose the type of chart displayed

As though it weren’t enough to play with labels, you can also determine the nature of the chart itself. It’ll automatically be a horizontal bar graph, but (depending on the type of question) you may also be able to choose to view the number of responses (how many people responded to a question) or the average and sum of the responses (for obvious reasons, this works best for numerical content).

4. Export each chart to an image file

Finally, when you’ve gotten as many responses back as you require, and you’ve customized each chart to the extent that you want to, you can simply export the charts as images (PNG files, to be exact) for inclusion in presentations or dossiers.To export all tiles at once, you can do so by saving them to a ZIP file containing each tile as a PNG. If you prefer, just save your charts as a PDF file for simple sharing. (Remember, by using the “Share” button in the lower left corner, you can still share your form files with coworkers and colleagues and let them play with the charts without exporting anything at all.)

These summary reports apply to all your old forms as well, so you can go check out some charts for any forms you’ve created thus far in your FormsCentral tenure. Go take a look at what you can do, or create your first form now.

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