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Newbie Question on Hidden Fields


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I want to use hidden fields in my form for a person’s name, but it's recommending marketing services, and I wish to use it with excel, can you use an Excel file with peoples names with hidden fields? versus having to use an external marketing program? and if so, is there any instructions on how to do it I could not find it in the help centre.

 

Thank you in advance for any answers they can help.

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Best answer by john.desborough 7 May 2021, 22:20

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@kennethholden - welcome to the community from a user

 

so a quick question, to help me clarify: you have an Excel sheet with name and email addresses and you want to use that as the basis to send out an email to clients and provide them a link to click to get to the typeform with the link/url having the hidden fields added to it? 

if that is correct, you can do the following as long as you have the ability to send email “out” of your Excel environment (with an add-in, etc) . I do this with Google Sheets and the Document Studio addin

  • in Excel you have a column with the user name (and email if you want to add this as a hidden field
  • you create a field/column in Excel to hold the combination of the URL string + the value inside your name (and other fields) 
  • you create the formula to concatenate the url string and the other fields into a clickable link, using the syntax required for the hidden fields
  • you create your email that can pull the value out of the url with hidden fields from your Excel spreadsheet. 

in the Google Sheets version that i am using, i have to use the following formula to autopopulate the fields down the Sheet every time an entry comes in - the purpose in showing it is the ability to bring field values from ranges into the url and generate it dynamically with each new entry. 

 

=ARRAYFORMULA(IF(ISBLANK(A2:A)," ","https://changedname.typeform.com/to/typeformid#email="&G2:G&"&firstname="&H2:H&"&lastname="&I2:I))

 

  • i’ve changed the custom url name and the typeform id (in italics above) 
  • the email address is pulled from a range (column G) 
  • the name is pulled from the range of column H
  • lastname from column I

 

you should be able to build those in excel easily

 

hope that helps

 

des

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Hey thank you I appreciate the quick answer. No all I'm trying to do is when I'm populating in my form in the name field is to use the hidden field section to auto populate a name, once they put their name in, and then all the future questions the form  addresses them by their  name to “personalize” the form.

 

The goal is to make it more engaging and welcoming.

Userlevel 7
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i completely understand… then drop the other bits i mentioned and then just pass the name field as a the hidden field to the form

 

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Hey thank you again I appreciate that I do know how to do it one at a time but if I'm sending this to 40 different people that I know I had to do 40 different links, the idea of using the Excel file is I would have a list of the 40 people that I know and when they put in their name, it would search the Excel sheet and pick up the name an auto populate the form for them.

 

That way I only need one link. :-)

 

If there is a way to use excel as a source file for the hidden field so I can do multiple entries in the Excel field and then the form can auto detect the name once they start typing and fill in the rest of the form with their name.

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No there is no way to use Excel as a source file to do that unless you want to dive into the programming world with the APIs and the web hooks. 

you can send bulk emails out of excel with addins - that is the only way you are going to really be able to drive this from Excel to Typeform without getting hand very dirty with the api. Microsoft Flow/Power Automate are the two native options in the MS world to take the details you want from your excel file, put them into the URL and send the message. 

here is a youtube video on that automation 

 

 

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