Pre-Populating Fields
You can pre-populate many field types so that an answer is pre-selected, or has a predefined text or numerical value, when people go to your form. If someone submits your form without changing the pre-populated answers, the pre-populated answer will be included in their final entry.
If you want to add example text to your field that disappears when people start typing (and never gets recorded in your results), use the Placeholder Text field setting instead.
To pre-populate a field on your form:
- Log in and go to Forms.
- Click the form you want to edit.
- Click a field to open its Field Settings.
- For Open-Ended Fields: In the Predefined Value textbox, type in the value you want to be pre-populated.
- For Closed-Ended Fields: In the Choices section, select the radio button or checkbox you want to be preselected.
- Click Save Form.
Supported Field Types
| Open-Ended Fields | Closed-Ended Fields |
|---|---|
| Single Line Text Paragraph Text Number Phone Price Website | Multiple Choice Checkboxes Dropdown Date Likert |
Prepopulate Country in Address Field You can also pre-select an answer to the Country dropdown when you're setting up an Address field type.
Fancier Ways to Pre-Populate Fields
Check out our blogs and guides for more tricks for prefilling data into your forms:
- Pre-Populating Data Fields Using URL Modifications - Add parameters to your form URL to pre-populate answers.
- Multiple Form Submissions with Prefilled Fields - For forms that encourage multiple submissions, learn how to pre-populate the repeated data so people don't have to type the same stuff over and over again.
- Use Wufood to Automatically Generate URLs to Prefilled Forms - Wufood is a third-party web app that lets you automatically generate complex URLs to your Wufoo forms based on the fields you want to pre-populate, so you don't have to worry about getting the formatting right.