Build your first form
About ten minutes. The form built here is Site Visit — who went where, when, why, and a photo — and the rest of this guide’s examples build on it.
Open the builder
From the sidebar choose Forms, then New form. Give it a name — Site Visit — and a one-line description. Both can be changed later.
Add the fields
The palette on the left lists every field type. Click one and it is added at the bottom of the form; drag to reorder. For Site Visit:
| Field | Type | Why that type |
|---|---|---|
| Date of visit | Date | A calendar picker, stored as a real date |
| Site | Dropdown | A fixed list to choose from — see step 3 |
| Who visited | Text | A name |
| Purpose of the visit | Long Text | Several lines |
| Photo | Photo | Taken on the phone, uploaded when there is signal |
Click a field to open its properties on the right. Mark Date of visit, Site and Who visited as required.
Give the dropdown its options
Select the Site field. Under Options, either type the sites one per line, or choose a Smart List — a list shared across forms, so a site added once is available everywhere. For a first form, typing them is fine; Smart Lists explains when to use the other.
Publish
Save, then Publish. Until a form is published nobody can collect on it. (This is the form being a draft, which is a different thing from a record being a draft.)
Publishing does not lock the form. You can keep editing it, and every change is versioned — a record is always filled in against the version that was current when it was started. See Changing a form that is live.
Decide who can use it
A published form is available to everyone in your organisation with a Collect grant on it. To narrow that, open the form’s settings. View and Collect explains the two grants — they sound interchangeable and are not.
Next
Collect a record on a phone walks through filling this form in on a device, including doing it with no signal.