Create online, password protected form template.

February 15, 2013 2:38 AM

Help me create a condition report template online for our gallery.

So I want to be able to move the gallery I work for forward in terms of creating condition reports for pieces of art that we are responsible for, at the moment, we print out paper, fill in with pen, and box file. Essentially when we check a piece of work we take photographs and make notes on the condition of the work. It would need to be a form that has check boxes to mark details such as glazed/unglazed, support: stretcher/paper/canvas/other, condition of frame good/damaged - please note. Etc etc. So this would be a form that we could access online, be able to produce a simply formatted output document from which we could upload to our artlogic database and next time we want to use the document it would revert to the form.

Do I make sense?

Thanks in advance for your help.

posted by multivalent to computers & internet (5 answers total)

next time we want to use the document it would revert to the form.

That part is kind of confusing.

You should look at www.wufoo.com. It's a simple, drag-and-drop form creator. You can have it email the reports and/or export the data as .xls, .csv, etc. Password-protection is easy.

I'm not affiliated with them, but we use the service where I work & have found it extremely easy to use.
posted by belladonna at 5:43 AM on February 15

Google Forms may be useful too.
posted by COD at 6:15 AM on February 15

Google Forms is a good option, but only if you're willing to forgo your "password protected" requirement. Is there a reason the form needs to be password protected? I mean, I doubt there's much of a market for fraudulently filling out art condition reports. Note that the results of such a form would be password protected (via the creator's Google account), but you wouldn't need a password to fill out the form. Could you just make due with not passing the URL around too much and having a sort of "security through obscurity" model? We used a Google Form to allow guests to RSVP to our wedding and there wasn't a single fraudulent entry.
posted by Betelgeuse at 6:52 AM on February 15

You can password protect a WP blog post, for example, and put the form behind that.

Setting up a Wordpress based site just for this seems like over kill but for what it's worth, Formidable is a great form plug in and has all sorts of great bells and whistles if you pay $47 for it.
posted by Medieval Maven at 10:50 AM on February 15

so your workflow is this:
* you create the form to mimic the condition form that you have now
* evaluator logs into the "form" (whether that be Wufoo, Google Forms, or WordPress/similar with a form plugin) using some sort of device (laptop, tablet, smartphone)
* evaluator fills out the form and submits it, which then stores the form data somewhere (depends on how/where you create the form)
* you (or you and other evaluators?) go in later and are able to view the submitted condition report
* you (and/or others) are able to export the data submitted and import it somehow into your database

assuming your database app has an import function (and it accepts Excel or CSV or you can easily convert the form exports to a format that it understands), this should be pretty straightforward to do with any of the suggestions here. you'd have to import the data into your database manually, which would be some time to do but would probably be way quicker than hand-entering everything.

there is one other option that is available, and that's getting a web development company or something along those lines to build something custom for you to do this. however, I'd only suggest it if you wanted one of these two things:
* pictures - if you want the pictures you take of the items to be stored in the database app as well, you'd likely need something custom or you'd have to upload them manually to each record there. (form things usually have a way you can capture the photos with the form, but export is a bit different - you can't really put a picture into a CSV file.)
* automatically adding the submission to the database - most of these things collect and then maybe at most send you an email. assuming there is a method to do this, the form could potentially add the submission directly to your database once submitted. (this would require further research.)
both of these would step a bit beyond simple form-creation stuff but also would cost more than "free" or "cheap", and either of these options might not be anything you want either. (though, there is a third option, which would be having someone else deal with it for you, which may also be a nice-to-have.)
posted by mrg at 1:31 PM on February 15