Learn how to create forms in Coda. Responses are automatically stored in tables, making it easy to organize, analyze, and share the data.

Forms can be useful for many things - from collecting feedback on a new product launch, to gathering team preferences for office snacks, to building a list of emails for your next party invitation.

With Coda forms, responses are automatically documented and stored in a table within a Coda doc. This makes it easy to organize, analyze, and share the information you are collecting.

Once set up, a Coda form can be shared by an external link so that anyone, even someone who is not signed up for Coda, can receive a form and provide their responses.

📣 Interested in learning how to publish and share Coda forms? Click here to learn more.

Create a form

To create a new form and responses table, type /form into the canvas or search for Form in the Insert panel and drag the Forms table into the doc.

You will be prompted to choose a Blank form or Connect to a pre-existing table - select a location based on where you would like for the responses to be stored.

Say you already have a table that you want to convert into a form. You can! Hover over an existing table and click Options in the upper right, then select See all options from the menu. At the top of the right panel, you'll see a list of different display types. Click More (next to the Calendar view option) and select Form.

Customize a form

Customizing a form is so important - it helps ensure you are collecting the right type of data for each question.

To start customizing the layout of your form, hover over your form, click on Options, and select Edit layout. While editing a layout, you have many different customization options, including...

In the upper-left of the layout edit view, you can add a title, add a description, and add a cover photo to your form.
In the side panel, you can hide any columns you do not want to appear in the form itself.
Click on any column block to edit that column name, add a question, or even add a description.
Click on the dots to the left of a column to drag-and-drop columns and adjust the overall form layout.

💡Tip: Use questions to add context to a column name for whoever you share your form with, while keeping the actual column name short for your table of responses. For example, a column might be named “Discussion Topics” and the description is “What would you like to discuss?”.

While editing the layout, you can also adjust each column in the form to have its own unique features. Click on the column in the layout preview, and you'll see a list of column-specific settings appear in the right panel.

Required: Click the toggle to turn it on and require an answer to a question before a form can be submitted.
Changing your column type: Coda forms can use any of the same column types as a Coda table. As an example, you can change a text column to a select list and display the input responses as radio buttons or a drop-down in the form to keep response data more clean.

💡Tip: Options for specific column types vary, and these will appear in your form panel options as well if you would like to make any changes.
Validation: In this section, toggle on/off required responses and also add rules and parameters for any response (required or not) by providing a formula. The error message can help guide users who provide invalid answers. There is a video below that shows this in action!
Visual: Put questions and response fields areas side-by-side (instead of on question on top) and switch between left, center and right text alignment for each question in your form.

Instead of editing the current layout, you might wish to just select another existing layout from your doc. To do so, hover over your form, click on Options in the upper-right corner, select See all options, then select Form display. Use the drop-down to select the desired layout for your form.

📣 Want to publish and share your form? Learn how here!

FAQs

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

Yes! You can share the Publish Form link (learn more here). It is also necessary to share this link if you would like to send your form to responders without Coda accounts.

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

Yes. While editing the form layout, select the column you want to edit. In the panel on the right, look for the Required option and toggle this on. This will require that the field be filled out before the form can be submitted.

Can I require people to login before completing my form?

Yes. From your form’s publish settings (learn more about this here), 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 add validation to my form?

Yes. When editing the form layout, select a column. In the panel on the right, you will see a Validation option. You must add a formula (Coda formulas) to set your validation. Don't forget to add an error message to guide users who provide invalid answers.

Why aren't the formulas in my form working 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 you reference another table or other rows in your doc when setting up validation in forms?

No. In order to protect the privacy of your data, your validation formula cannot reference another table, another row, or basically anything outside the context of the form being filled out.

Can I use branching logic in Coda forms?

Not at this time.

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 use select lists and relation columns in my form?

Yes, with some caveats for forms that you publish. When you publish a form to a unique link (learn more here), only the information necessary to render the form is hosted at the new destination to prevent unwanted information disclosure. This means a table of items pulled into a select list or relation column is not copied to a new form by default. You can adjust this in your form's privacy settings by toggling on Include all relation columns.

Can I allow multiple selections from a list of options in a form?

You sure can! Use a relation column and make sure that in the relation options panel, you toggle on Allow Multiple Selections.

Why can’t I add a new item as a quick add to a select list column in a published form? It appears in the builder but not the published form.

This is only allowed in the builder. Allowing external users to change the form would violate the security principles of Coda's form feature. A workaround is to add an “other” column where people can enter free-form responses. Learn more about publishing and sharing forms here.

What privacy settings are available?

For forms that you do not publish a unique link (learn more about this here), 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.

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. (Learn more about publishing forms here)

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