šŸ†• Tape forms private beta – community-driven, fully integrated

I love the new forms. Thanks for letting us get our hands on this so early. As soon as the file field drops I’ll be able to replace a half dozen forms for 3rd parties.

I’m super excited to switch over to the native forms. So far, I especially love the ability to populate all fields from an app and the live preview.

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We’re addicted. :smile: First of all, thank you so much. It’s honestly ā€œfunā€ to work with the new forms. Since yesterday, I’ve spent hours building. It’s such a unique experience, compared to Google Forms, which we’ve been using a lot.

We just launched our first live form! :tada:

To be honest, our needs are much simpler, we can’t even think on the same deep level as the brilliant experts here. That said, a few field types are still missing for us too. For things like email and address, we used text fields as a workaround and it worked just fine for now.

The one field we’re really looking forward to is file upload. There’s no easy workaround for that in our setup, and we have a few use cases that rely on collecting files through web forms. But I saw it’s already on the roadmap, so we’re really hoping it’ll be available soon.

Thank you for all the insights and the care you put into this. We’ve honestly never experienced this kind of openness and attention to detail from any other software team we’ve worked with.

And just to keep your motivation high: :smile: if records end up working the way you’ve described, that could even replace the last few things we’re still using Salesforce for.

Next step: switching from Google Forms to Tape Forms
What our team love so far: the flexible column layout, how quick and smooth building feels, the option to add text and images right inside the form

Absolutely incredible work. Thank you!

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Thanks for all the feedback! Every word truly means a lot to us. It’s energizing the team as we’re developing the new features.
There’s a full recording of the Forms Private Beta launch available, big thanks to @Jason and @Luis for hosting the session.

And of course, thank you to everyone who joined us live – it was great to share this moment with all of you!

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I’m usually just a quiet reader here. Our setup with Tape has been running smoothly ever since we switched from Podio two years ago, and I haven’t really needed to change anything. But we also use Google Forms, so I gave the new Forms feature a try and wow, it’s really good!

Now, Google Forms feels pretty basic compared to Tape. With Tape, building the form was straightforward, and setting up a dashboard to analyze the responses was super easy. Plus, both look really nice.

We built this internal survey form, for example, and it worked really well for us: https://share.tapeapp.com/9702d1e27ee24664b27c1a098c85f2bd

As you can see, the select fields in Forms work fine. In some cases, it’d be even nicer if the options appeared side-by-side or as a dropdown for longer lists.

Still, I’m already a huge fan and we’re definitely building more!

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Thanks so much for sharing your form, LaurenRos. We’ve already started using forms too.
We’ve tested almost everything from the ā€œtoday’s feature setā€ listed above, but honestly, there’s always something new to discover. :slight_smile:

Your form looks fantastic and the content is great. I absolutely love the icon idea. The tree-planting idea is such a nice bonus. I also had no idea you could edit the link name like that, super clever!

I don’t want to just copy it, but would you be open to sharing your setup?

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For long forms like that, I wonder if a ā€œMulti-Page formsā€ feature would be a good addition. This is how Fillout does it.

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Great job guys :grinning:
When are the phone, address(location), email and number fields going to be available? These are the only missing field types preventing me from using the built in forms.

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Forms feel great already. Clean UI, smooth UX. Excited for conditional logic and big thanks to the team!
@LaurenRos we’d also be very interested in using your form if you’re open to it.

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Hey @Luis – we absolutely love your idea of multi-page forms!
We believe this could improve many use cases. Our vision is to support multi-page functionality both in forms and in the new record.

@buildingwealth – you’re absolutely right! All of those fields are super important.
We’re working on features like the Files field and more (see ā€œComing Nextā€ above).
Huge thanks as well for the feedback in this week’s survey. We’ll make sure the results are reflected in our feature roadmap. Honestly, because of all that, we can’t share an exact release date yet, but those fields are on our roadmap, and we’re excited to get them to you as soon as possible so you can make full use of the new form experience. In the meantime, just an idea:
You could use a single text field in your form for each value you want to collect, for example, one for email and one for phone.
In the linked database app, where the records from the responses are created, you could use an automation to copy those values from the single text fields into the correct field types you need.
Of course, this doesn’t replace proper field types like email or phone, but it might help as a temporary workaround until all fields are available in forms.

@LaurenRos - thank you for sharing the great, beautiful form! Category dropdowns are on our list, thanks for highlighting that, super helpful!

Thanks again for all your amazing input, we truly appreciate it.
There’s a lot of exciting stuff ahead.

Today we released:

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šŸ†• Forms templates are live in the template gallery
ready to duplicate and customize.

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Hi @Luis,
I had the exact same thought! :smile:

Just to add some more into it, I also thought about having some kind of reference of the process (like a progress bar, some page numbers, or something similar).

Then also, some conditional next page depending on filled fields but this of course is going to depend on conditional logic itself (and its implementation). I mean having the ability to have two completely different second pages depending on the filled fields on page one.

Finally, it could be interesting to think about the progress from page to page (require manual action or automatically when filled), if there are restrictions (required fields on page one to continue to page two) and also if this is a vertical move (like a ā€œsectionsā€ effect) or a horizontal one (more classic page to page).

Thanks.
Best,
R.J.

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Hi @Leo,
Wow! This multi page feature applied to records would be soooooooooo valuable. It would allow to better assign space and so much more to better organize everything.

Screen real estate is a bit hot and pricey nowadays with the current record implementation. :sweat_smile::rofl:

Thanks.
Best,
R.J.

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Spontaneous Feedback:

I loved the option to turn table into a form. But this showed me a situation, which I never had before - just because we always needed to have a form and a table separately :smiley:

Look at this situation. Its a recruiting app. I ask the applicant how he found us. In the past I filled out this field. Now I can ask the user itself. But the option I want to show my applicants are less than the ones I want to be able to fill out. So I thought about removing one or more options from that question - still keeping the field connected, but to have more options in Tape itself. Currently I could only kill the option completely - thus also loosing the existing data. Basically internal and form view need to be in sync in terms of available fields.

I know, its a wish that comes up because its so well integrated. Its not a bug, its maybe some v2 idea. So while people can make some selections in the form, I could add more options inside - because the same application may be fed by another channel.

:smiley:

(maybe an answer in a question just needs the option to be hidden)

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Hi @dirk_s,

Thanks a lot for your super insightful feedback! Really appreciated :100:

We actually came across this exact situation while designing Forms and Layouts. That’s one of the key reasons we introduced Rules as a general solution for these kinds of problems.

With Rules, you’ll be able to show or hide specific category options (and later also members, relations, etc.) – even without a condition. This means you could keep all your internal options, but only show a smaller selection in the form for applicants. That way, your internal setup and the form don’t have to be 100% identical anymore.

In fact, the exact kind of rule you’re describing already exists in our planned rule action list: ā€œHide optionsā€ or ā€œShow optionsā€. It’s fully built into the concept and will definitely be part of a future release. So yes, it’s coming!

Thanks again and best regards,
Leo

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Hi @dirk_s,
I came across a similar problem the very first day I started using Tape forms. You probably already know about this but just in case let me tell you the workaround I found.

I created another app and form cloning and deleting the options that aren’t needed. I then connected the submission with the original one using automations on submission/record creation.

I know it is quite clunky/painful, could add noise (specially for search or messing apps), and depending on the case could not be a solution (it is not dynamically hiding/showing fields)…

Thanks.
Best,
R.J.

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Update: šŸ†• File field for forms

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Update: šŸ†• Image field for forms :tada:

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Cool!

Some ideas for further enhancing webforms:

  • hidden field for JavaScript to read e.g. referring URL or read a variable from the URL (e.g. to use one application form for a variety of job posts, but to automatically identifying the referring one),
  • allow to change the wording of the submit button, (e.g. apply, order etc.)

(I bet other field types like email and phone will follow anyway :wink: ).

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@Leo since I have the ā€˜New Record’ I can’t create new Forms anymore - the option to do so is gone. Could you reactivate that plesase.

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Hi @Kollaborateur,

thanks a lot for the report! It might indeed be an issue with the feature flags. We should definitely double-check that for all users to be safe.

Could you please send me the email address of the user where this happens via Direct Message here in the Community, so we can make sure we’re checking the correct account?

Thanks again and have a great day!
Leo

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