Randy Dean shares a backup strategy for web forms: copy each field's content into a Word or Google Doc before submitting, so you don't lose everything if the form crashes. He also recommends building a library of reusable answer templates for questions you answer repeatedly.
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All right, hi everybody, Randy Dean, Email Sanity Expert here. Um, I'm hoping I can save you a whole bunch of pain from a learning that I had myself just recently for about the 3,000th time, uh, a couple weeks ago. Um, it deals with web forms, and a lot of times we are now required to fill out a web form to submit for something, make a purchase share information, complete a survey. And it brings back, frankly, some of the worst times of the 1990s. Let me explain to you what I mean. Remember in the '90s before we had autosave for our Word documents, Excel, and PowerPoints? And you'd be working, working, working, working, working, working, working, and all of a sudden, bang! Program not responding, and all of that work is lost. It's lost, it's gone, bye, and you're not getting it back. That was 1990s. Thank you, autosave. But there's still a place where it still happens in the ugly world of web forms. Let's talk about this. See, I took a web form, little piece of a web form And let's remind you two bad things that can happen. Number one, see, notice this one says 100-word minimum. So you put in, let's say you put in 96 words and then you try to go to the next one because it's not 100 words and it freezes up. Had that one happen. Or for some reason in the programming there is a character limit that is not listed in the description. So you've got a 100-word minimum, but there's a 1,000-character limit and you go to 1,006 characters even though you're just barely over 100 words because you're using big wordy words and it freezes up. Or you go all the way to the end after typing in brilliant responses and you're up to the quality and competence of the designer, the programmer that built the web form. They're just not that good at it, you know, they're new. And you click submit and you get the 404 error and you try to hit the back button and it goes back but the form is completely empty and you just lost all your work. When that happens, I want to give you a tip and this will save your sanity. Every time you fill out a web form, open up a Word or Google Doc in the background. And every field that isn't like just a couple words to type, anything where you're putting in extensive, at least as soon as you fill it in, do a Ctrl+A, which is select all, Ctrl+C, which is a copy, and then go to that document and paste it. Even better might be to make the draft of what you're going to put in here in the Word or Google Doc first and then copy and paste it from there into the field. Either way, don't move to the next field until you've got a copy of what was in this field in another location. And you will thank me for this at some point in the future when you too are filling out a web form and it just dies or doesn't submit, or everything's lost. And it happens way too much. Um, I would tell you, uh, one thing I would suggest as a designer, after everything that you fill in that's big, maybe have a button, save and continue, save and continue, so that way people don't lose the form if they go all the way through and then something goofy happens. Just an idea if any designers are watching this. Hey, by the way, bonus tip. If you're doing a lot of these, like, see, I do a lot where I'm submitting to speak at upcoming events or conferences or submit for a webinar. Little idea for you. If you're doing these kinds of things all the time, maybe you should make a document where you have all of your answers to all of your questions. I got all my answers to all of my questions general questions, and then I have specific descriptions for each of my programs. And I've even saved different formats of the descriptions: 100-word, 150-word, 50-word, 75-word, extensive outline, 3 bullet points, 3 shorter bullet points. Hey, what's a good tweet? See, what do you need later? Try to save it every time you do it. If you're doing it, why not save it for later? Because you're probably going to be asked again later. I hope this saves you from my pain. You can tell I'm a little salty on this. It's happened to me a couple times. More than a couple times. So don't let it happen to you. All right, let's finish this thing up. Once again, I'm Randy Dean. Hey, look at that. Oh, I just did that. Pretty cool. I'm Randy Dean, Email Sanity Expert. Uh, if you'd like to learn more about me and my programs, go down and check out my website, randaldean.com. Uh, if you like my videos, please click like, please subscribe, and please write a comment. Maybe tell me about some of the bad things that have happened to you in webform land. And if you'd like to get my series of productivity PDF tip sheets with tips on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Google usage, 365 usage, Google Workspace usage, smartphone/tablet usage, and how to reduce your distractions Send me an email, randy@randalldean.com, and put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll send you way too much stuff to help make you save your time and do things better. Bye, everybody.
