10 things I learned about Forms

I have been working a lot with forms lately, and thanks to my favorite client (they will recognize themselves) I also learned a ton! Here are my key takeaways around forms.

:one: If you need to ask for a list of things, like diplomas for an application form, then start by asking about their first diploma and include a question “Do you have another diploma?” and branch the “yes” answer to a new set of questions and so on.

:two: Each question is given back with the answer inside the task as a result of a submission. But the question description isn’t so make sure your team does not need to see the description along with the answer to make sense of the data.

:three: I am a big fan of emojis and I believe they make a form cool and fun to use. Place an emoji in front of the questions. Be careful though to not offend people: an old man for a question about age or a man (not along with a woman) for a question about gender might be a bad idea.

:four: I reached the limit of the branching mechanism and the magic number is 5: you can’t nest more than 5 branches.

:five: The biggest form I created so far had 120 questions, no technical limit in sight!

:six: Make sure to connect questions to existing custom fields if you want to sort submissions based on that value later, or filter, or just export the submissions as a CSV and have the freedom to do whatever you want.

:seven: (NO LONGER TRUE) You can’t connect a “multi-select” question to a drop-down custom field. If you need to ask for several values, one solution could be to use a drop-down question with a “Multiple values” option that shows a text field for free input.

:eight: If you need to have an “I agree” or “I understand” checkbox, you can use a multi-select question with only one option. And make it required.

:nine: If you need to ask for a number and a currency, you don’t have much choice: ask for the currency in a drop-down, or ask for the whole value in a text field.

:keycap_ten: For your information, if the field you connected to the title of the task (using “Select a field for task titles”) is left blank, the name of the project will be used.

:asterisk: Bonus: most forms include “big” sections with explanations like “Part II: personal data. bla bla bla”. You can’t create sections in a form, but you can have a question of type :eight::point_up_2:

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Great summary of lesson learned!

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When I place an emoji in front of the question, for example, :smile: it doesn’t appear when view the form. Is there a work-around?

I am surprised because I do manage to do it
https://form.asana.com/?k=uuhBO66bWA93O5-4Yt_yrQ&d=1199168271926687

Can you look at my form and tell me what I’m doing wrong?
Feature Request - Form by Asana

You pasted the emoji code (from Asana I guess), when you should paste actual emojis. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ4VxNkTUOk (Ctrl+Cmd+Space on Mac, Windows+. on Windows).

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