PandaForm: Drag-and-Drop Form Building

PandaForm is a new form building service that lets you put together online forms via a simple drag-and-drop interface. Payment processing can be incorporated, and a mail merge facility is included so that pre-filled, personalized forms can be sent out to your users.

Once you’ve signed up (a very painless process), you can get to work creating forms straight away. The drag-and-drop interface is fairly intuitive. Most users probably won’t need the friendly tutorial video on the form building in order to get going, although certain aspects of PandaForm aren’t quite as straightforward as I would like. In particular, the way that you can apply a “two-column” CSS class to the form that results in changes only to the published form and can’t be seen in the form editor may take a little getting used to.

Forms built using PandaForm can incorporate all of the standard HTML form elements: Single and multi-line fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, drop-down menus, date input, file upload and so on. PandaForm can automatically apply validation to form elements; to check that email addresses entered into the form actually look like email addresses, for example. It can also check for and disallow duplicate entries. Once elements have been added to the form they can be dragged and dropped to re-order them, and you can also stipulate which fields are required.

Once your form is set up, you have the option of setting up a few other settings, including adding determining whether users are redicteed to a website or shown a confirmation screen once the form is successfully filled out, and whether you’d like a CAPTCHA verification on the form to stop spam submissions.. You also have the option of enabling payments, which is useful if you’d like to use PandaForm to build a purchasing form. Currently, though, the only merchant accepted is Paypal, and the interface is a little tricky to figure out — it would have been nice if it was as easy to use as the form builder.

Hit the “Publish” button and you’ll be provided with a link to your form, which is then ready to use. Completed form data is accessible via the dashboard; you can also set up sync with a Google Docs spreadsheet to collect data there, if you prefer.

PandaForm is still in public beta and although there are a few rough edges to sort out yet in terms of its usability, it’s a useful service that’s worth checking out if you’re looking for a relatively painless way to build an online form.

Currently, there’s only a free account available, which comes with:

  • 10 Users
  • 3000 New Entries per month
  • 5GB Storage
  • SSL Encryption is not available

Let us know what you think of PandaForm in the comments.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post