Coda’s forms make gathering information easy, but it is important that responders can also easily give this information!

You can share a form with an external link so that anyone, even someone who is not signed up for Coda, can receive the form and provide their responses.

ℹ️ Interested in learning how to create and customize Coda forms? Click here to learn more.

Create a link for sharing

Have a form set up in a Coda doc and ready to collect responses but you just want to share the form itself without the rest of your doc? Not a problem! At Coda, we call sharing content externally, publishing. Keep reading to learn how to publish a link to your Coda form.

To publish a form, open the Form Options menu, select Publish and click the Create link button. Copy the link that is provided and share with the world! You can also get here by clicking Publish at the top of the form.

To get a preview of what your form looks like and make sure any special customizations you set work as intended, click Preview form.

💡 Tip: You can use that published form link to then embed your form in other Coda docs (and beyond).

Tailor your shared form’s features

Would you like to have the ability to stop collecting responses to your form after a certain benchmark? Or perhaps you are including relation columns in your form and want to make sure that all information from the relation table properly shows up in the form.

You can find these and more in the Privacy section of the Publish Form options panel.

Expand the Privacy section to take customize features like:

Allow Submissions: This setting is automatically turned on when you publish your form. Stop collecting responses by toggling it off.
Require login: Toggle on if you would like to require users to be logged in to view and respond to the form.
💡Tip: Are you just looking to automatically gather the names of whose response is whose? You can do this with a Created By column. Just add a new column to the responses table, and use the CreatedBy() formula. Hide this column in your form or turn on Include People (see below).
Include hidden columns for URL parameters: Toggle this on to be able to be able to encode your URLs with parameters that are collected in hidden columns that people filling out your form would not see (more on this here).
Include all relation columns: Defaulted to off, however, if you use formulas in your relation column or relation table, you must toggle this feature On for those formulas to work in your form as well.
Include people: Toggling this feature On includes every doc user - including respondents and doc viewers - as a selectable option in any People column.

Lastly, when sharing your form’s link with others, Coda has two additional preferences you can toggle off:

Submit again: Clicking the eye to hide this option will allow responders to only submit one response.
Coda branding: Clicking the eye to hide this option will remove the Made with ❤️ using Coda at the bottom of the form.

These are accessed by clicking Form Options and then selecting Layout. Scroll to the bottom of the panel.

Some notes around the privacy of the information in your form and the doc in which it lives:

For forms that you do not publish a unique link, sharing settings are controlled by and the same as the doc’s settings that the form is in. That is, people who have access to the doc will have access to the form and its results. (Learn more about sharing here)
For forms that you publish with a unique link, you can choose to toggle off relation columns or people options to prevent private data from being visible as options in your form. You can access the privacy settings for published forms in the same panel you found the unique form link.

FAQs

I have edit access to a doc, why can’t I generate a published link for a form?

Even if your’e a doc editor, you won’t be able to retrieve the published link to a form if the doc owner has disabled Allow anyone who can edit to change permissions and share — found in the Share menu’s advanced settings. (see more about sharing docs here).

Can I send out a Coda form so people can enter responses in a form (and it goes into the doc) without accessing the doc itself?

Yes! You can share the Publish Form link. And sharing this link is also necessary if you would like to send your form and get responses from users without Coda accounts.

Can I require a response to a question before a form can be submitted?

Yes. Click on the column type drop down and toggle on Required to require answers to certain questions before a form can be submitted. Learn more here.

Why aren't the formulas in my form populating correctly?

If you're seeing an error for a formula in your form, this is most often means that your formula is referencing relation columns. If your formula is referencing relation columns, you need to make sure you toggle on the Include all relation columns option in your form settings. This will allow the form to access the data in those relation columns, and should therefore ensure that your formula works correctly.

Can I require people to login before completing my form?

Yes. From your form’s publish settings, you can toggle login requirement on or off underneath your form’s custom link. When toggled on, users will be required to login to complete your form.

Can I stop my form from collecting inputs/receiving answers?

Yes. From your form’s publish settings, in the privacy section you can toggle submissions on or off underneath your form’s publishing link with Allow submissions.

Can I configure pre-filled fields in my published forms?

Yes. Learn about this in this article.

What privacy settings are available?

For forms that you do not publish a unique link, privacy is controlled along with your doc’s settings. That is, people who have access to the doc will have access to the form and its results.

For forms that you publish with a unique link, you can choose to toggle off relation columns or people options to prevent private doc or teammate data from being visible as options in your form. You can access the privacy settings for published forms on the same panel where you generate your unique link.

Can I remove the Coda branding at the end of my form?

Yep! You can turn this off in the layout panel by clicking on the blue eye next to Coda branding. Branding is off if the eye is gray.

Is it possible to have two published forms feed into the same table, but have a different set of columns visible in each form?

For sure. If you click Edit layout, there should be a Create new layout option to create another version of the form. You can also use different views of the results table to show the respective columns that are relevant to each form.