Scenario

Sometimes you need to collect a lot of information on a form. Which means being clear about the information you need and making it easy to input that information. Otherwise, you could get stuck with incomplete information or users can take much longer to fill out your forms.

That’s where layouts and groups can help! For example, we have a multi-step application with a Licenses & Education section. We could make users scroll through all the questions like this:

Or we could use different layouts and groups to better organize the form and require less scrolling, like this:

Which would your users prefer?

Requirements

If this your first time creating an app, you'll need to know some basics about adding objects, fields, pages, and views. You can start by watching our "Introducing Knack" video tour and then working through the articles in our Builder Basics section. Other good resources can be found in our designing the database and building pages sections of the knowledge base.

Steps

Select the Page with the Form

In the Pages section of the builder, select the page with the form view you want to customize.

Open the Form Editor

Click on the form view on that page to open the editor and go to the Inputs section.

Change the Layout

For a new layout, hover over the form inputs until you see the Layout option show at the top. Then use the dropdown to select the number of columns you want:

Add a Group

To add a new group, click the Add Group button at the bottom of the Inputs section:

Organize Your Form

Now you can organize your form into the columns and groups you’ve added.

In this example, we’ve split the Licenses and Education sections into their own groups. We also used 3 columns for the Licenses section and 2 columns for the Education section: