Data collection & management can be a time consuming and painful process if you don’t have the correct tools in place. With tools like Formstack and Smartsheet you can easily collect data from your customers, employees, and more from simple online forms then you can manage that data in Smartsheet.
Add Formstack Documents to the process and you can instantly populate documents with the data you’re collecting to produce quotes, contract, reports, letters, and more.
In this example, we’re going to show you how to collect data from a customer via a Formstack form on our website, save that data in Smartsheet, the generate a proposal in Formstack Documents and save that in Smartsheet as well.
To get started, we’re going to setup the template for our proposal using a Word document. Inside Word, we’re going to our standard proposal information (logo, contact info, etc) then for the spots that we want to insert a field from our form, we’ll use a merge field like {$FirstName}, {$Description}, etc.
Here’s what our proposal looks like:
Once we have our template ready, we need to upload it to Formstack Documents. On the Documents page, click the New Document button and enter a name. On the next step, choose Office Document, then pick the file from your computer.
After you’ve uploaded your file, you’ll be taken to the Settings tab where you can modify various settings like the type of file that is generated and the name of the file. For this example, we’re going to produce a Word (DOCX) file so our team can easily edit the proposal if needed, and we’ll include the name of the person in the file name.
Next, we’re going to setup the delivery of our document so that it is automatically uploaded to our row in Smartsheet. Under the Deliver tab, click the New Delivery button and select Smartsheet from the list.
Once you authenticate your Smartsheet account, you’ll need to pick the Sheet that you want to upload the data to, then we’re going to use the Search option to find the row, based on the Email column we have in our sheet and we’ll use a merge field {$Email} for the search value.
Once you have saved your Smartsheet delivery, we are done with the setup process inside Formstack Documents, and we’re ready to setup the integration with our Formstack form.
Inside Formstack, under the Settings > Integrations page for our form, we’ll want to first setup the integration with Smartsheet to make sure our form submissions are being saved as new rows in Smartsheet. Here’s what that setup looks like:
Once you have saved your Smartsheet integration settings, we’re going to setup the integration with Formstack Documents. You’ll need to enter your API Key and Secret (which you can create under Account > API Access inside Formstack Documents), then you’ll have to select your document you want to merge.
Go ahead and pick the Proposal document that you just setup and Formstack will load a list of the merge fields in your document. For each merge field, pick the corresponding form field from the dropdown on the right.
Once you have matched up all of your merge fields, save your integration settings and turn them on. We’re ready for a test! Open up your form and submit a new submission. This will send the data over to Smartsheet to create a new row in your sheet and to Formstack Documents where your proposal will be populated and saved on the same row in Smartsheet.
Here’s what our file looked like saved in Smartsheet:
Congrats, you’re all finished! You can now instantly populate all kinds of documents from Formstack and Smartsheet. Check out the video below to learn more about leveling up your document generation process with Formstack Documents.
