Hi,
I've been writing a LOT of articles targeting advanced features of Ultimate Forms, to help our customers leverage their SharePoint to do more for them. I've always assumed my audience had a fairly good understanding of what Ultimate Forms is and how it can be used.
Today I want to address those for whom these are the very first steps in their journey. I understand that learning something new can be at times overwhelming, so I will do my best to keep it simple and not to assume any prior knowledge.
In this article I will describe and guide through your first encounter with Ultimate Forms, from installation to designing and publishing your first SharePoint form.
Installation
We dedicated a lot of effort into making the installation process as simple as possible. Both in Microsoft365 and on premises, the installation takes a form of a wizard that guides you through.
- Start by clicking Try Now Free button at the top of this page.
- If you are not an administrator and have no permission to install anything on SharePoint, you simply choose to try in our online demo. A dedicated SharePoint site will be built for you in our demo tenant and you will be able to try all the features for 30 days, free of charge.
- If you are an administrator and want to work with your real data in your own environment, you need to install:
- If you are on premises, fill out the form and download the installer. Run it on one of your SharePoint servers and follow the prompts, no changes to the defaults are needed.
- If you are on Microsoft365, enter the URL of one of your SharePoint sites (such as https://example.sharepoint.com). You will be prompted for permissions and, a couple of minutes later, the installation will be done. Note that you can also optionally pre-install one of our solution templates, so you immediately have something to work with.
Getting Started
Now, open your SharePoint site in the browser. Navigate to any existing list and you will find the Design button in the list toolbar. This is your entry point for all the configuration settings of Ultimate Forms, including forms, actions, alerts, print templates and many others.
If it's your very first time, you will be greeted by the Let's get started welcome screen:
Here you can either create a new list, using our AI-assisted Form Generator or you can choose to design the current list's form (the list that you came from). With the Form Generator, you simply describe the form you need and the AI engine will suggest the most common columns for it.
We already pre-filled the description for you and you just can click Continue and create a vacation request form (and who doesn't like those!). Or you can change it to anything else you need. You can skip straight to Form Designer section of this blog if you chose to design a form for the current list instead.
Form Generator
Once you clicked on Continue, you are presented with a list of columns very similar to this:
Feel free to re-order, add, delete and modify columns as you see fit. Once you become more comfortable with using it, you can delve into creating repeating sections, permissions or validation rules, but for now, let's just deal with columns.
Once happy with the result, click on Create to actually add the new list to your SharePoint site. You are now ready to use Form Designer to further embelish your new form.
Form Designer
Here you can decide on the layout, styling and behavior of your new form.
Tip: use Containers to control the layout. You can control how many layout columns each container will have to place columns side-by-side. You can also assign styles and theming to each container and even place containers within containers.
Additionally, experiment with using Tabs or Accordions, add text and images to guide your users or even add buttons to accomplish tasks. Once you feel more adventurous, consider adding rules and permissions to automatically set column values or show/hide columns under certain conditions.
Once you are happy with the result, click on Publish. Within seconds the new form will be added to your SharePoint list/document library, nothing else needs to be configured.
Final Thoughts
Ease of use is one of the most important aspects of Ultimate Forms. We understand there is a lot on your plate and we want to make the whole process of working with SharePoint forms and workflows as simple and approachable as possible, with minimal learning curve. Feel free to get in touch with us with your thoughts and suggestions!
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