Leveraging Custom Forms (August 31, 2021)

Transcript

Welcome everybody. I’m so excited you are here. This session today is on the topic of leveraging custom forms. So that is just one of the more popular areas and important areas within Workfront. So I’m super excited about this particular session. For those of you guys that I have not met, and I think I have met so many of you through these sessions. My name is Kristin Farwell, and I am the Senior Manager for Customer Marketing for Adobe Workfront. So I manage things like these user groups, anything like the newsletter or communications that you get from Workfront that also comes through me or my team. So excited that you guys are here and able to participate. That’s my sweet husband there and our two dogs down on the Texas coast.

This session is being recorded. So if you have colleagues maybe who weren’t able to make it today, or there is something particularly exciting that you think, oh man, I wanna go back and look at that later. We do record this session. We’ll share it on Workfront one. We’ll share the slides out as well. So you guys don’t have to take frantic notes. Betsy will be sharing some good stuff today. So that’s handy. I’m gonna chat about the agenda here in a moment. But well, before I do that, I wanna get you guys started on some introductions. Normally if we were in person, we’d go around the room, we’d say hello, we’d share what we had for breakfast.

In virtual setting, we have to do this in the chat area. So if you wouldn’t mind, open up the little chat function. There’s an icon there on the top of your team’s window. And I would love for you to share maybe what company you’re with, your role. We have a variety of different roles, lots of different companies. Where are you located in the world? I’m in Austin, Texas. And is there something particular you hope to take away from today? And you shared that with us too when you registered, but just curious as you’ve been thinking about it, is there something that, man, I’d love to know this from Workfront or from other folks. And just for fun, I am curious to know if you grew up to be, this was a hard one to type out, like how do you word this? But if you grew up to be the thing you thought you’d be when you were a kid, what would you be? I imagine there’s probably a lot of firemen in the group, a lot of teachers. I was telling Betsy earlier that I think I probably would have been a veterinarian or a teacher or an astronaut, a veterinarian astronaut. Is that a thing that happens? So curious to know what you guys thought you would grow up to be.

And then while you are doing that, because it always takes a minute, people have to ruminate and think about it. So while you’re doing that, I will share a little bit about what we’re gonna cover today. I’m doing this one a little bit different for those of you guys that have attended user groups before we shortened the time on this one, we’re gonna try it out. So even though we have 90 minutes on the calendar, I think we’re probably gonna use about an hour today. And if we end up with so much discussion, we use the 90 minutes, that’s fine. We have the time blocked. And if we don’t, then you get 30 minutes back in your day.

But we’re right on time, chatting through the agenda, some introductions. Here in a minute, I’m gonna pass things over to Betsy West. Some of you guys may know Betsy, I hope you do. She is a huge part of our training team. She actually wrote the whole training program for Custom Forms. So she teaches the beginner version, she teaches the advanced version. So I’m super excited to have her with us today. And then we’ve got the rest of the time. So she’s gonna share a little bit of best practices, some background on Custom Forms, some examples. But again, super interactive. So it’s not a training session, it’s really meant to be asked questions while you’ve got this expert on the line. And then we’ll use whatever amount of time we’ve got for some group discussion. You guys submitted some good questions when you registered, so we’ll go through some of those. And I would just say, throughout the session, if you have questions, type them into chat, use that little hand raise function, and we’ll make this as interactive as we can. And so with that, give me a second, I’m gonna pop over to the chat. I won’t go through them all, but I’m just curious to see. We’ve got, hi Kathy, Mayo Clinic, looking to see what other folks are doing. You would also be a vet. You like it? Betsy, thank you for saying hello. Betsy’s curious to know what people want to understand about Custom Forms. Honestly, this is probably really helpful for her as a person who builds training. What is it that you guys want to know about this? Is that part of our training? Is that something we might want to add later? Another teacher. Sarah Dominion, Dominion in Minnesota, looking for tips and tricks, an aeronautical engineer. We’ve got an archeologist. Let’s see, Tamara, hi Tamara. Senior Ops Manager, wanted to be a writer. You can still be a writer. We can still do all these things, guys.

Alison is in Denver, IT Project Manager, Creative Uses for Forms, a dog cuddler. That is for sure a real job. I agree.

All right, guys. Well, with that, and keep them coming, because I always like to scan through those later, I’m going to go ahead and pass things over to Betsy. And I just have to point out one other thing. When I grabbed this photo of Betsy off of our internal channels and I made it larger, I was like, what is that in the background? Is that Diagon Alley? So for any Harry Potter fans, if you look at what’s in the background there, that is indeed Diagon Alley. So Betsy, I’m going to hand off to you and let you share your screen. Sounds good. Yeah, I’m a huge Harry Potter nerd, so it’s above and beyond. I have to admit that one of my favorite responses here was from Chloe who said she was convinced that she would transform into Britney Spears. I think we all in some form or another would love to transform into Britney Spears.

Well, cool. Yeah, so like Kristen said, I am a trainer, well, my official title is a learning program manager. I’ve been at Workfront for six and a half years, and I’ve been with Adobe for six months.

I’ve been in training the whole time, so I’ve gone the whole spectrum from delivering content up to right now where I’m actually creating the on-demand content that you see on Workfront one. I helped build the system admin training and certification. If you’ve taken that or plan on doing that, I had a hand in that. So I’m always really interested to know what you guys want to know, because like Kristen said, that helps us understand what our training needs to include.

Just a couple of things about what I’m expecting today, I guess. One, I don’t necessarily like hearing my voice the whole time, so please ask questions. I don’t have all the answers, so there are gonna be times when I’m gonna look to you to help each other out, because I know you guys really learn from each other more often than you learn from us necessarily, but I’m hoping I can answer a lot of your questions here today. So is everybody cool with that so far? Awesome. All right.

So I’m gonna share my screen. Hopefully I can do this correctly here.

Perfect. Can you guys all see my screen? Yep, good to go. Okay. That’s me. All right. So first question is how many of you have found all the fields you need in Workfront? You didn’t have to do anything else. You didn’t have to use any other forms or spreadsheets or documents in order to gather all the information you need.

I love the immediate answers. Nope, not me. That’s true. That’s what I was expecting, to be perfectly honest. And just to let you know, that’s actually the way we built it.

Workfront is really here to provide the foundation for the most commonly used fields that we found throughout organizations, right? So everybody needs to know when a project starts or who’s assigned to a request or something like that, right? Everybody needs to know that. When does work happen? Who’s assigned to it? So you know who to contact, when you’re doing that work, et cetera. So we actually designed it that way. And because we designed it that way, we also created an opportunity for you guys to create your own fields, because everybody, as I like to say, is a special snowflake. And everybody’s got unique information that they need, whether it’s in the wave of the vocabulary you use, or it really is unique data that you’re looking for. So that’s where custom forms come in.

So we’ve got kind of a wide range of people here. Some of you guys are brand new. Some of you guys are way down the road, you’re experts. You might even know more than me.

So I kind of just want to start with the basics so we all have the same foundation, and then we can kind of go from there. Also, if I get a little too teachy, let me know, because I do have, that’s my instinct is to teach.

So foundation, again, just to start off, everybody on the same footing is what’s a custom form? What does it do? So usually how I describe it, it’s just a virtual way to capture unique data specific to your organization. So it’s something you build. You can use a variety of fields, and that way you can attach it to a project. You can attach it to a request. I’ve seen some organizations attach it to users because they want to capture data about the user. If they’re really people-oriented, they want to know their birthdays, they want to know when they’re going on vacation, they want to know maybe their T-shirt size, if they’re doing merchandise. So there are lots of things you can do.

Was there a question? Okay, cool. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t talking over anybody.

So that’s just the foundation, right? It’s just a virtual way of capturing unique information to you guys.

So I really like actually getting into the system and demoing some of this stuff. So I’m actually going to dive into my preview environment, and we’re going to just go over some things that I’ve noticed with organizations that I’ve seen throughout the years.

And again, if you have specific examples or if there are things you’re looking for in particular, please put them in that chat. I’d love to get them answered here while we’re together so that we can get them resolved for you. Okay.

And Kristen, you’ll have to help me know when I’ve got a question there. I will, I will, yeah. Perfect. Perfect. And feel free to interrupt me at any time. Yeah, and I just want to say guys, we have, I know 17 people that seems like a big group, but it’s relatively small. So if you guys have questions, I mean, you can type them into chat, but it also is fine if you want to come off mute. You have the ability to come on and off mute. That’s why we had some background noise a second ago. So you can use the hand raise function, come off mute. We’re a pretty informal group today. Totally. Yep.

Oh, I do have a shameless plug real quick.

People are always asking for best practices. I think we actually, when you guys registered, we had quite a few people that were asking about best practices. If you haven’t seen this page, I would highly recommend you go here, bookmark it. What we’ve done in training is we actually talked to a bunch of Workfront experts and we gathered what they have deemed as a best practice for certain areas within Workfront. One of which is custom forms. So I can put this in the chat. If I can figure out how to do that, I’ll do that towards the end. But bookmark this page, we’ve got a bunch of topics. Again, one of which is custom forms and you’ll see we actually have quite a few suggestions or best practices listed here. I think it’s actually one of our biggest topics. It goes anywhere from how do I keep track external information from vendors all the way to what types of fields should I be using in my custom form. There’s lots of options we provide why you would do it this way. So it provides that context. I’ll try to incorporate a couple of those here today throughout the user group discussion here. I just dropped the two links into chat. I dropped in the general best practices page that has all the different topics. Then I clicked on that custom forms and put that link in there as well. So you guys should see that there in the chat. Honestly, this is a good one to bookmark because it is a couple clicks in Workfront 1 to go to the training area, then you go into resources. So this is a good one to bookmark. Definitely. Beautiful. Thank you for doing that.

Some of the things that I’ve seen just with customers in general, it depends of course on where you are in your maturity with using Workfront, with using this particular tool. Because you might be using Workfront for a couple of years, but maybe you’re only using the request area or maybe you’re using a very simplified form of the projects area.

You might be new to this. So I’m going to start with what I’ve seen for those who are just starting out. Then I’ll show you some tools with custom forms that people have used once they’ve advanced a little bit further, and some examples of some fields that people have built to show you what the possibilities are within a custom form. Custom forms are one of my favorite things about Workfront because you do have the ability to be a little more creative with them. So what I have seen for newer customers if they’re just starting out, what I have seen some customers do is that they will just create a custom form that basically is a bunch of text fields. So they’re not getting too complicated.

Let me go back to my slide deck here. So right here on the left, they’ll basically create these new fields and it’s all text, whether it’s a single line or paragraph. Because really what they’re trying to do is just have a centralized location to gather data. They’re not particularly worried at the beginning about structure or reporting on it. So here they’re just like, look, put in the information and maybe in three to six months, we’ll start really reviewing the responses we’re getting. That’s when they start saying, okay, we’re getting this typical answer for, let’s say, purpose of the project. We’re typically getting these five answers. So what they’ll do is instead of leaving it as an open text field, they’ll change it to a drop-down menu. Or they’ll, for instance, like with expected delivery, we do have a date field that you can use so that people don’t have to continually type in the date field in different formats. Plus over here on the right, this is what they change it to. It makes it easier to report on. Because after that initial gathering, you’re probably looking to start reporting on that information. You want to start seeing trends, you want to start seeing where there’s room for improvement or where you’re doing really well so you can celebrate those wins. So that’s typically what I’ve seen new organizations do as they start to progress in their understanding of, how are we capturing this data? What information are we typically getting? Can we make this easier for our users? With custom forms, the most commonly used fields are drop-down menus, check boxes, and single line text fields. Really with drop-down menus and check boxes or radio buttons, that makes it really easy and simple for your users. Freeform like these text boxes, that’s fine, because your users then have that ability to type whatever they need. But sometimes that can cause confusion, especially with your reporting. Having a set list of options in a drop-down menu or a set list of options in a series of check boxes, really hones in your users experience to say, okay, this is what they’re looking for. This is what I need to fill in. This is what I need to provide them instead of them trying to guess what you’re looking for. Does that make sense? I think something that’s really nice too about when you give those drop-down options, sometimes when there’s an open text field, if somebody is in maybe the wrong form or they’re in the wrong place, I don’t know if this is right, but I’m going to just type my request in here. Or if you ever wanted to automate something to say, if people choose finance, we’re going to handle the project this way. If people choose operations, we might handle the request this way. In an open text field, you just don’t have that same ability. It also gives you a lot more flexibility with what you do next. Exactly. Something else that you guys have probably used in a custom form that helps with that honing in your users focus and making it easier for them to understand is providing instructions. I don’t know if you guys have seen this, when you’re building a custom field, there’s an instructions section. Enter that in here. Tell them specifically what you’re looking for. Because if you do have a free form text field like this, or even a drop-down menu, this just provides them increased detail. People are not getting frustrated with your forms and then just bypassing the form altogether. I have seen that in the past with other customers where they’re like, you’ve got 20 options in your drop-down menu, and I don’t know which one to select. What they do is they just pick a random one, and then in their request, in the description field or whatever it may be, or in an update, they just go in and provide that answer. Having those instructions will help your users have a better experience with filling in the form because you’re providing that additional detail. Yeah, go ahead. No, I was just going to say you’ve got a couple of comments about that too. As one person that said, people don’t always click on that question mark. She says putting in a field with the directions, if you have field level. Yeah. That’s an excellent option as well because you’re right. You can see here that question mark, it’s very light, so people’s eyes can glaze over that. I know that mine do. It’s a really good point that you can create another field. One of the best practices that I have learned over the years is to use the descriptive text field. Have any of you guys used that before or have you seen that used in forms before? Do a show of hands. Do you see the little hand raise icon at the top of the Teams window? Curious. I’ll look over at the couple of people. Oh, there we go. I’d say we’re about half. Awesome. One of the best things you can do, like what was said, is use that descriptive text field. You can see here in this custom form, I actually used one. Instead of using a free form, I just said, look, in this case, all the test drives are going to use the same password. But you can use that field to let people know how to fill in those fields, what to look for, what the form is for. You can even put hyperlinks in here. I know that I was working with a customer. Being at Workform for six years, it seems like forever and also very fast. But it’s probably about three or four years ago, I worked with two customers that they used the hyperlink to actually go out to a Excel spreadsheet. They had part numbers in there. Instead of creating a drop-down menu that had 200, 300 options, they actually hyperlinked to an Excel spreadsheet that had all the part numbers, the descriptions, because it was already built. We’re not asking you to rebuild everything in Workfront. We just want you to use this form to enhance your process, your workflows. If that works, that’s a great way to do that. Betsy, one question that came in, somebody had asked about pros and cons of using a drop-down versus a checkbox. When you don’t want to use open text field, but you can either make it a drop-down or a text box, when are those good for which? Yeah. Typically, what I have seen, it just depends on if you’re looking for a multi-answer or a single answer. Of course, you can do multi-answer with a drop-down, but I think it’s harder to visualize all the options in a drop-down menu versus a checkbox field where you see them all listed out. Typically, if you just want one answer, I would use a drop-down. If you want multiple, I would use a checkbox. That’s how I’ve seen it used by several customers. Another question about drop-downs is, there was a question about this somebody had asked when they registered around, when you change a form. If you go in and edit a form and change an original that may be a text field, and you change it to a drop-down or a checkbox, do you lose the original data? Initially, no, but there’s a caveat. When you initially switch over, the system does initially keep that information that was there. However, if after the switch, after you saved your form, if somebody goes onto the object, let’s say it’s a project form. I go to the project and I need to edit that form on the project. As soon as you edit and save it on the object, that’s when you lose that data. Because the system reads it as an entire form update instead of just a field update. Does that make sense? Kate, you had asked that question. So you can come off mute or type a note in if that is. Yes, thank you. Because I totally understand how you might need to use a free text field at the beginning, just to see what information people are giving you. Then it’s so nice to know that you can clean it up and make it consistent. But then where does the previous information go? So I just wanted to verify that you do have to make a choice going forward. Exactly. It’s nice that you can switch that up, but like you said, you do have to make that choice of, do we want to keep that historical data or are we starting from this point forward just with the new data? Just as a side note, I don’t know if there’s something you want to do because there are pros and cons to both. You could keep that original text field and put it into an archive section. So I’m assuming you guys have all used sections before and understand that you can actually make sections only visible to people with certain permissions. If I’m a manager on a project, I could be the only one that sees that section full of fields, or you can make it available only to admins. So what you could do is if you still wanted to keep that historical data, excuse me, is you could create a new section that’s only visible to certain people, and move that field into that section. So that’s there, and then you could from this point forward create a new field that is in the format you want, whether it’s a drop-down, checkbox, radio button, whatever it may be.

The cons with that is that the naming convention, the naming has to be slightly different because of course in Workfront, typically, you want to distinguish those fields, so you know which one you’re pulling from. Two, that can increase the number of fields that you have to maintain. Now, you have to weigh that out. Is that historical data important to you enough to do that process, or are you willing to just let that go because you already know what the users are going to input, and you just want to move forward. So totally up to you, it’s just another option. Something I have seen one or two customers do in the past, but typically, with customers I’ve worked with recently, they’re willing to just move forward and collect data in the format that they want. Thank you. I appreciate that. That’s very helpful information. You bet. That was a really good question. There’s a couple other questions in chat, but I’m going to go ahead. I haven’t forgotten about you guys, but I’m going to let Betsy move ahead because I know you’ve got some other tips that you want to share as well. Yeah. Don’t worry, I won’t take too much longer because I do want to answer these questions. This is your time. There’s just two things I wanted to show with Custom Forms. You may already be familiar with them, but I want to talk about why you would use them. These two things are probably the main reasons why I love Custom Forms because they really make, at least for me, they make the forms interactive. It makes it fun to work with them, to create them, and to see how users react to them. Two things, logic and calculated fields. Again, just asking out of curiosity, have any of you guys used logics? Have any of you guys created calculated fields in your forms? I would also be interested to know what kinds of calculated fields you’ve created because I’m always looking for new examples in my classes.

The hand raise on this one is a little bit less, maybe a third or a quarter of the group. Okay, cool. There’s a note, one person had actually, Jacob had said, use logic but haven’t been successful in calculated fields and Samantha says, logic fields if then. Yes, perfect. Again, just so everybody has the same foundation, I’m going to just give a brief description of what is a logic and what’s a calculated field. Let’s start with logics.

Most of the time when you’re building a custom form, or maybe typically what you’re used to with any form, let me show it here, is that it’s one long list of fields. Everything showing all at once, so people can just go through and fill out the fields that pertain to them. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because some people want to see everything to make sure they’re not missing out. However, I have found, and I’ll be totally honest, I’m this way, is if I see a long custom form, I already feel defeated. I don’t want to go through this and have to scan through all the fields to see which ones I need to fill in and then on top of that, determine which fields or what they’re asking for in that field. I typically will hard-press customers to use logics, because in particular, a display logic. What that does is if you look at this, in fact, let me see if I can make it a little bit bigger. What this does is it hides fields until a specific answer is selected. Just as still shots, you’ll see here on the top left, we have a very shortened custom form that has some field showing. Purpose of the project, expected delivery date, and then we’ve got this field here that has a series of checkboxes. What team are you using for this project? Are you going to use finance, professional services, product, support? What I’ve done here is that if they come in and they select product marketing, we’re going to use them in this project. That’s when a new set of fields appears in the form. It only shows when they select that answer because it pertains to the product marketing team and the things they need in order to fulfill the project need or the request need or whatever it may be. It really helps your users have a better experience with the form. Because it shortens it, it makes it dynamic and specific to their answers, what they are filling in.

Just so you guys can see that in action, I’m going to do a preview of this form here. Again, this is actually the same product form. But if I come in here and select product marketing, you’ll see that that’s when that section appears. I can even, in essence, cascade it. This is the product marketing section. There’s another question here that says, is there event related? If I say yes, I get another set. Is it virtual? Yes. Well, which application are you going to use? Versus if I come back here and say, well, actually they’re going to do on-site, I get a different set. It really makes this form interactive and again, easier for your users as they’re filling it in. I love logic. You will find, again, for those who have used this before, there are two types of logics. There’s a skip logic and a display. I would be interested if you have found this, but I have not found a good use case to use skip logic. I’ll be totally honest, I don’t think I’ve ever used a skip logic except to teach to show that it’s a possibility in real life. Working with customers, I think a 100 percent of the time I’ve used display logic. You’re getting a lot of agreement in chat. A lot of people say, I stay away from it, I’ve never used it, we never use it, me too. Perfect. That actually might be a really good question and I’ll take the action to post on Workfront 1 for some hive mind to say who out there is using skip logic and see if we can get some examples, because now I’m curious. If there are examples, again, I would love to know. I personally have never found it useful because again, I’m all about condensing the form to make it as short as possible and only show what’s needed for the user. Skip logic, it still shows it. If you choose an answer, you bypass a whole section. I just haven’t found that that’s been a good user experience. So yeah, if you post that, I would love to follow that thread and see what examples are out there.

Display logic for me is the way to go. I don’t know if anybody else has experienced this. You do want to be careful about the number of logics you’re applying to one field. I feel like I’m just talking and talking, but I do want to just share this example. I was working with, no, I was at an admin boot camp.

One of the admins that were there, they had inherited a custom form from a previous admin who had left the organization. Now they had to come in, they had to make changes and updates to the custom form because things had shifted in their organization. This custom form, each field had at least 15-20 logics on each field, except for two, which had between 60-70 display logics. I was like, oh my gosh. I felt really bad because that is really hard to maintain and to understand which fields are attached through logic. That’s a lot of maintenance, that’s a lot of headache for whoever is inheriting, as well as for the person who created it. Typically, what I would recommend is to keep it, if you can, to five and under. Obviously, there’s going to be exceptions. Just know that that maintenance can be difficult, especially for the person coming after you. Chloe just told me that you can put animated GIFs in Teams chat. That’s amazing. Awesome.

One other thing, just because you talked about that, I haven’t seen it and I’ve been trying to recreate it. But I was working with Anthony Messam, who is one of our amazing consultants. He actually has seen several customers put emojis in the custom forms so that you can make it a little more visually friendly, or if you want to include those. I don’t think you can add GIFs, but definitely, he’s seen at least, you can add emojis to your forms. I’ll have to ask him how they did that.

I’m just going to talk about one last thing and then I promise I’ll stop talking at you and hopefully answer some of your questions. I’m sorry, Kristen, I know I’m a little over time. Hold on. I got on and off mute five times. No, this is actually super helpful. All of this is great, so carry on. Okay. Like I mentioned, logic is the first reason why I love custom forms. But the second reason, calculated fields makes me love them even more. If you haven’t realized it, I am a little nerdy, a little geeky, I’m both. And calculated fields really make custom forms fun to build. So a calculated field, how many of you guys have worked in Excel before? Or I guess more specific, have worked with formulas in Excel? Probably more than half the group, maybe a little bit more than half. Okay, cool. So you already know that formulas are actually pretty handy in Excel. Calculated fields are basically the same concept in Workfront. We call them expressions, but they’re basically just formulas. You can start taking information that’s already gathered by Workfront and then using an expression or using a formula to create new information.

So I just want to show you two examples that I’ve seen customers use a lot. One is creating a unique project ID. What I’ve seen with organizations is that they will have a project ID number that includes the year it was created, they want the initials of the person who created it, they want a specific reference number and maybe one or two other things. So I’ll show you a calculated field that pulls all that information together. The other one is people have typically wanted to know how long did it take to complete something. From start to finish, how long did it take us to complete the project? How long did it take us to complete the request or the task? So if you’re like me where you’re not necessarily math-oriented, it would probably take me a couple of hours to even subtract the actual start date from the completion date. You can just build that into a calculated field and the system will automatically tell you, hey, based on these two fields, we know it took three days, it took 17 days, it took a 136 days. So you can start to see trends, you can start to compare what you had planned on happening versus what actually happened, and start to improve your templates or change your templates to accommodate for whatever’s happening.

Let me show you days to completion first. In fact, if you guys are okay, I’m just going to switch to the PowerPoint because I’ve already got it listed all here. You can be as simplistic as you want with a calculated field or you can be as complicated as you know how to make it. Again, just know that with calculated fields, whatever you build, you have to know how to maintain it, you have to know how to edit it. Here’s an example of a complex calculated field to get the pipeline revenue. You can see we use if statements, we use status, we’re nesting, we’re rounding, there’s a lot going on here. So you can create this in order to provide that information you’re looking for. In this case, with days to completion, this is the calculation. So with calculated fields, there are lots of different expressions you can use, or if you’re familiar with Excel formulas, you can use text, you can use mathematical. In this case, we’re using a date expression, which is weekday diff. Essentially what we’re doing is we’re taking two fields that are already being captured by Workfront. We’re taking the actual start date, the actual completion date, and we’re just having the system calculate the difference between the two. In your reports, you can see here, this was the plan duration for the rebrand existing training content. We had planned on spending about 60 days on it, but the actual amount of time it took to complete it was 29 days. So if we’re seeing that consistently with those types of tasks, we can then go in and start to adjust our project templates to say, well, on average, we’re only taking about 30 days, so we can half our project time, and we can deliver faster because we know that’s the average time. Here, it’s actually the opposite. In this task, we had planned on three days and it actually took us 174 days. Now, that might be an outlier, that’s just a one-time incident. But again, this is just bringing those upfront through a calculated field. The system is doing that for us. The second field, this one’s a little more involved and we’re using several expressions. We’re using several formulas nested in each other to produce the project ID that we want or that we established within our organization. Now, I’ve created this report to show you that it is pulling in the right information. I will let you know I’m using a test drive, and the test drives sometimes are a little skewampy. So you can see here that the year doesn’t match the project ID, but it will do in your environment. This one’s a little more complex, I don’t want to say complicated, but it’s just more complex because we’re taking bits and pieces of information from fields. Here, you can see that the person who entered the project into the system is Anne Owen. In the project ID, we just wanted to grab her first initial and her last initial. We had to use and nest different expressions in order to just grab those two letters and put them in the project ID.

It took me a while to put this together to figure it out. They’re not always easy to create, but once you have them, they make things so much easier, so much faster when you’re collecting that data. I bet you there was a question and thankfully I think it may have already been answered, but it’s like I had asked, are the expressions defined somewhere? Some are pretty obvious, but not familiar with all of them. This one is a pretty complex one that might not be so obvious and Chloe had shared a link that said the calculated field section will give you some context, for things like the syntax for the formula you build. Oh, perfect, calculated. Can you actually I’ll grab that link and put that in chat, so it looks like calculated data expressions. Yes, that’s the name of the article. But like you said or that was said here, it does tell you what the express, like it gives you a definition of the expression. That doesn’t always provide you with the context you need. So you may still have to play around with some of these, but at least there’s a definition to an extent here.

The other thing I have found that in community, a lot of people share expressions that they’ve built or if they have questions like hey I’m trying to build this expression, I’ve done this. A lot of people will come back and say, oh, I’ve built something similar, I just use this instead or I use this formula or I use this field. So I’m a creep on community where I just creep on other people’s discussions. I’ve learned quite a bit about what people are doing. That’s a really good resource on where you can ask questions about, I’m trying to build this, how did you do it? I would actually not underestimate that. I think the community, there’s so much collective knowledge in the community that chances are, if you’re trying to do something and hitting a roadblock, somebody else has hit that roadblock as well, and there’s probably a good chance somebody has figured it out. So obviously if you want to figure it out yourself, do. But I mean post and even somebody who might say, oh, I haven’t but let the collective group help you figure it out. Totally. Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of, it’s almost like a work group where there’s a lot of discussion back and forth in the thread. Say, have you tried this, have you done this, and then gone to the end of the thread and realized that they discovered it on their own, which was fantastic. So definitely. There’s a specific question in chat and we can try to answer it here. I don’t know if we’ll maybe need to put it into the community afterwards, but Elisa said, we would like to run reports of planned versus actual hours slash dates, but we found that we had to change planned to match actuals to be able to accurately forecast resource planning. Any tips for this? If we want to noodle on it and post something after, we really can. Yeah. Sarah says I would look at baselines. Yeah, baselines would be a good one.

Let me think about that one. As you said that we actually did a user group maybe two months ago on planned versus actuals. Chuck Middleton, who’s another one of our awesome trainers, went through similar to this, he went through some examples of using baselines. So Elise, I’m going to drop a note in the community follow-up with that. Take a look at that, see if it’s helpful. If not, we can noodle on it a little more. Yeah. Baselines are a really good way to help you see what you started with versus where you’re at currently. As you get more scope creep to determine if that’s happening. So that’s definitely one way that you could see what resources are needed at this point. Let me take that question though because there are several things that are bouncing around. So really that’s the last thing that I had to show you. Another shameless plug for the best practices. Because one of the things we run into a lot, especially with system administrators, is how do I maintain all of this? Because system admins have a lot to do or even group admins, anybody who is managing the system to an extent, whether it’s for your group specifically for the whole system.

What is going to be your best friend is reports. In the last couple of years, we’ve added filters, we’ve added views that allow you to see where custom forms are being used, what fields are being used, and where. That way you can understand, can I delete this field? Is this custom form still being used or not? Can we start cleaning up our system? Just one of the best practices here and something I would highly recommend is if you can, once a quarter or even every six months, go through your system and just do an analysis and start saying, what are we still using? What are we not? What can we clean up? What do we have to keep? Because if you wait even a year, two, five, your system is going to get so out of control that it’ll be hard to maintain anything, especially custom forms. Custom forms are probably the easiest thing. Data and projects are the easiest thing to start getting wildly out of control because they’re so useful, and because there’s so many things you can do with them.

I will stop talking.

Even before you stop sharing your screen, I think there’s a couple of questions that people might want to see something. I will ask one question. It was really early on and I promise Kate, I haven’t forgotten about you. You had even said whatever is appropriate. It was, is there a capability to print a custom form in the builder version? This would be helpful to review the form, the fields, the data collections with stakeholders. There’s not. Okay. I wish there was. Innovation Lab. Yeah. The main idea. There currently isn’t a way to do that in the builder form here. Don’t hold me to this because maybe it was just wishful thinking, but I thought I had heard that it’s being thought of as a possibility to print this, or even print just the custom form. But I haven’t heard any update about it. I haven’t even heard recently about it. So we’re stuck with doing print screens in order to do that. I wish I had a better answer. No, that’s all right. It was an answer is an answer. Yeah. We could always hope. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. You bet. Yeah. Chloe also said, wanted to mention the custom forms in reporting are called categories. I suffered way too long before realizing that. Oh my gosh. Me too. Yes. Something to keep in mind. Let me go ahead and close this. If you are building a report to know about custom forms, so just for a sec because I want to show this, it’s important, so thank you for bringing it up. If you are building a report about custom forms, like how many do you have, which ones are being used, whatever it may be, the field that you need to look for, as was stated here, is category. If I wanted to do a filter to say, I only want to see projects that have this custom form on it. When you’re creating the filter, this is what you’re looking for, category ID. Probably you’re going to go with category name. That will show you the custom forms. Thank you for bringing that up. Again, because this is for project, it’s only showing me the project custom forms. If I was in a task, it would show me task custom forms. But yes, you are looking for category, not custom forms like you would think. Super helpful. That’s not as intuitive as it could be. Not at all. That probably took me a year and a half to figure that out. That’s good feedback. I think the other two big things that I wanted to chat about while we have time is just creative uses. Probably half the people who registered on the registration form said, what do you want to talk to other people about? It was a mix of just best practices, which we’ve covered. Then what are other people using these things for? I’m curious to know, and this is a little bit audience participation, I’ll let Betsy start. But what are you guys using customs forms for? Is there something other than request cues and requests are really common? But do you have a custom form at your organization that you’re like, oh, we use a custom form for this that maybe folks might think about? Betsy, I’ll let you maybe share some examples while people are hopefully typing some examples. Yeah. I’ll be totally honest. I tend to see the typical use, which is either on a project or a request or issue. I have once or twice seen users, or excuse me, an organization use it for a user, because you can attach custom forms to a user. Typically, where I’ve seen that is if they are trying to gather information. So when they have holiday parties, or if they’re doing a service project, they already have that information of what their size is, what allergies they have. The other thing is if a manager is trying to capture days off, I wish it was used more often, but I don’t typically see people using the time off section within Workfront, because you do have to click a little bit to get to it. I have seen organizations find it easier in a custom form, have people log when they’re going on PTO. They’ll again attach it to a user, and then they’ll create a calendar essentially, of here’s when everybody’s got their time off for the next quarter. So those are just some examples that I’ve seen. Typically, because I’m a trainer, I tend to see the more traditional side. But yeah. There’s a couple of good examples in chat. Tamara, I don’t know if you are interested in maybe coming up. You have a couple that you’ve shared for task forms, and then leadership doing the weekly report. Do you mind sharing a bit? Yeah, no, not at all. What we’ve done is, so I’m in a marketing department at a health network, and we have a request queue for people needing stuff from our department. But when our team is creating a project and they have tasks that they need our digital team to do for the project, like do social media postings, doing an update to our public website or intranet, instead of making our own staff go into the request queue and submit it, we wanted to keep it within the project. And so what we did is we mirrored the digital request forms in our request queue, and we created them as task forms so that folks can take advantage of adding the task form for a public website update or a social media post into the task on a project that’s already running. And we just started doing that, seems to be working well. It just focuses our own staff on what our digital team needs to create those updates in those digital areas, which is helpful. The other thing we did with our leadership is our VP wanted leadership just to kind of do sort of a weekly hit list of, you know, what are they working on? What are their strategic priorities this week? What’s been completed? And, you know, there’s about five or six categories that you wanted to hear from leadership as to what they’re doing. So I created a request queue that is only available to be seen by our leadership team. And they go into the request queue area and they go into their leadership weekly update and they go in and they just submit their update. And so that goes into a report that then our VP prefers a PDF. So she gets a PDF of that report, which just collects what’s come in for that week. And so our leadership, they can either continually go in and write a new update every week, or they do know how to kind of go into that queue project and simply copy last week’s and update it and add it as a new request, if you will. So. I love that. That’s great. Thank you for sharing that. I have made some mental notes, especially for that leadership update one. There are there are a couple other ones and I just I actually want to spend some time going through these. I know I had mentioned we might stop at the top of the hour. It was a test we thought we would maybe be able to finish, but there’s such good questions. I’m happy to continue on. If you have to drop, that’s fine. But I want since we have blocked 90 minutes, I’m happy to just keep going on some of these questions. If you can stay, I would I think there’s two other good examples. If you guys don’t mind sharing, maybe Allison, if you want to, you don’t mind coming up and sharing. And then maybe after that, Chloe, you have some good stuff to share as well. Allison, pentagon. Yeah, so we we use custom forms a lot as well. One of the kind of new fun ones that we created was a project intake process. So we have probably like 50 projects that come in every year. And we this allowed our management to go through and answer key questions like, how does this impact our budget? How does this do this? You know what I mean? Very scripted. And so they’re just seeing answers. They’re not seeing point values, but using the custom form and work front, we were able to assign values to that and then average that up across the seven managers that ranked that project or answered the questions. A couple other ones I threw is we’ve done kind of the updates as well, like Tamara mentioned. And then also like key flags, anything I can do to let people inline edit in a report so they don’t have to go into an update stream or if they want to pull something in easily. That’s usually where I look for custom forms.

Great, super helpful. And then for us, I’m like a total Excel nerd. So like anything with an if statement, I’m down for it. So we have a lot of like pretty nasty looking formulas. And if I ever left, I hope someone can step in and figure them out. So we did kind of shoot ourselves in the foot there a little bit from the maintenance perspective. But we have a lot of forms like we’ll do an internal admin form that only the admins can see. And it’s kind of uses our fusion flag. So if anyone’s used fusion, sometimes that starter module that you have, it’s not as specific as you need it to be that you could get with a report. So we’ll just manually flag stuff and say like this needs to go through fusion. And then once it goes through fusion, fusion will kick it off and say, yes, this has been touched by fusion. So that’s one of the big things we use. And then the calculated forms, I mean, the calculated fields are just kind of like unbeatable for me. Like we have a specific naming convention where it’s the first four digits of the year followed by the month. And then an underscore and then a three digit or a three character market code and then another underscore. So we were able to come up with a calculation that basically says are the first six characters of the name digits? Is there an underscore after that? Is there the market based on the market that was selected in a form? So it’s pretty, pretty complicated. But a lot of this stuff too, when you’re doing the custom forms or the custom, like the calculated fields, is it allows you to get much better grouping and charting. So there’s stuff that we could do like weekday diff. You can put that in a column, but you can’t sort by that. So if you want to be able to have like a functional field, it has to be a calculated field so you can sort on it, group on it and chart on it. So that’s been huge, huge for us.

That’s awesome. I am looking here through, there was something, oh man, there was something that you were talking about when you were sharing about some of the fields and the calculated fields. And it has completely escaped me as I started looking back through the chat. But when I think of it, I will let you know, other than job security of like having all of the knowledge behind all of those if statements. This is Eleyka. We actually have something very similar to what Allison and Tamara had mentioned. So we do have a project intake process. We actually, that is how we score our projects. The scorecard wasn’t really, I guess, useful for us. So we went ahead and created that. And same as Allison had mentioned, it’s a question that they answer. They see no value behind it, but they are getting scored.

We use that to score all of our projects across the board in a consistent manner so that we can prioritize them accordingly. And then for the updates, we have what we call a dashboard. It’s a project snapshot, but we do have custom fields. Our managers and leadership were used to seeing the usual four slide panel when providing project updates. So basically we created some custom fields that are inline editable for our users within the report to make sure that they can provide an update for the last 30 days, next 30 days, any budget or risk concerns and things like that. So that gets pulled that way. We could do it either by project or if we wanted to run a full report. We have done that.

And then we also use custom forms just for, we started using in addition to project management for like more of a run the business activities. So it’s for the specific type of requests. So they are associated to the request queue. So if someone has a request for new equipment, there’s a series of questions. We do have a lot of display logic and no, I’ve never used skip logic. I would love to know if anyone actually has.

But yeah, we do have several uses. We have, I guess, some calculated fields. I would love to know more about calculated fields. I’m always trying to improve our reporting because there are just as Chloe had mentioned, there are certain limitations when you’re just trying to just build it directly within the report. I’m trying to improve my skill when it comes to just building them out in a custom form so that it’s easier to pull them in reports.

Awesome.

And Betsy, jump in anytime. I’m just kind of going down the list of questions. But if anyone is asking questions and you’re like, oh, I have some good advice, Betsy, please do jump in. Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting point to bring up because when you start getting more familiar with text mode and calculations or expressions, whatever we’re calling them, it is a really good thing to point out that you can build expressions directly into a filter or directly into a view or a grouping. But like Chloe pointed out, those don’t always translate well. It’s harder to report on them. So even though you can use them, I would probably build them into a form because that way they’re stored and I can use them in any report in any facet that is needed to make that a possibility. So I think that’s a really good thing that was brought up.

Florence had a question. Is there a way to automatically add a custom form to a document that’s uploaded? No, there is not. I don’t know with Fusion if that’s a possibility.

But yeah, it’s the same. There isn’t. There’s no way to do that currently. I wish there was.

I know we’ve done that before. Yeah. Well, I was also just going to say that reminded me when Chloe, when you were talking and I was like, dang it, there was something in my brain and I have this. It’s Fusion. I am trying actively right now to plan a user group in maybe two to three weeks on Fusion, but specifically the work front to work front automations. So using Fusion to automate processes, not necessarily going out to other applications, but within work front, kind of how do you automate? Just as a side note for you guys, if you use Fusion only for automations, not for external integrations, it’s half the price. So I’m just going to throw that out there that it’s actually, if for nothing else, if you’re like, I want to dabble, but budget constraints, it’s cheaper if you’re just doing the work front to work front. So I’m meeting with someone this afternoon or else I would give you more info, but cross your fingers. I’m excited to do that session. I think that will be a good follow up for this group. If you want to kind of go to something a little bit more advanced.

Cool. Let’s see other questions. I’m just scrolling through the chat.

Oh, Sarah, you had posted something in chat that I wanted to bring up to you said we had used, we used the user custom forms to track our progress as we moved to the new work front experience. And I would love to hear more about that. I will also say that this was a good example. Similarly, we had a couple, maybe a couple of weeks ago, a month ago, we did a user group on transitioning to the new experience for anybody who’s not migrated over. We’ve got until March 22nd. So start making your plan to migrate to the new experience. But somebody had shared an example that they had a custom form for people that maybe, you know, if they were saying, well, we’re going to move this team to the new experience than this team than this team. And if there was somebody that wanted to move over early, they created a custom form to say, move me to the new experience. And it was literally just a like, hey, I want to move early. And they could go in and just move that person over to the new interface, even though maybe their team might not move for a couple months. And so it’s a simple use, but it was something that they said we wanted to jump on that really quickly. Sarah, do you feel comfortable coming off mute and sharing what you guys did? Yeah, I just put the calculation in the chat as well. It’s just real simple. It has Quicksilver. And when somebody was enrolled in the new work front experience, that field would update to true. And I did a group by group implementation. So this was a great way for me to see my progress. I had my little bar charts and reports so I could show the percentage we’ve gotten through and where we were at. It also helped me identify people that weren’t generally in a group. We have a lot of contractors that actually we give full work front licenses to because they work so much in our system. So trying to find those outliers was really useful as well.

Nice, that’s handy. There is, Kathy, I see your note about we don’t use Fusion. Don’t know much about it. Would it be helpful? I think it would. I’m trying to have somebody join for the very beginning of that user group to do maybe two slides on kind of the basics of Fusion. But I do want to get into the specifics of automation. Betsy, correct me if I’m wrong. There are some kind of Fusion basics learning paths on work front one. There is. We just released them this quarter. Okay. So that might be another one too. They’re free. The learning paths on work front one are free, guys. So there’s lots of kind of 30 minute videos, things like that. And there’s a new Fusion one. Are there any learning paths on custom forms? There is. Are there any learning paths on custom forms? Oh, yes, there are.

Yep, you can take one on custom forms and then there’s another one on calculated fields where we go over the most commonly used calculated fields, provide you examples. There’s exercises. So definitely. I’ll find them and see if I can post them in the chat. I also have just posted a follow up thread on work front one. You guys will all get an email. I’ll send it out here in the next hour or so that has a link to that thread. Either Betsy or I will leave a comment in that discussion that has some of the things we talked about, like the learning paths, that calculated expressions article. The I believe and include the Fusion one. I’ve been keeping that of a list off to the side, the best practices, that sort of stuff.

Tamara, you had a question that I don’t know that your abbreviation there, WNE, the mysterious all button that showed up with checklists. Yeah. When we migrated our forms into the new work front experience or oh, it should have been NWE. NWE. I was like, what’s WNE? But all of a sudden, the checklist that I had, a new option showed up in the form that said all, which never existed, like that someone could click the all button and all the options, the multi select options would be checkable. All of a sudden, this new button showed up in the new work front experience in my forms. And I was like, no, I don’t want all. So I just didn’t know if you guys had any background or history with what the hell.

Okay. I don’t, but that’s a really good question and we can ask. So between Betsy or I will ask the product team.

What the heck? Yeah. What is that? Yeah, it just sort of, I noticed it in forms as I was doing, you know, just going through my stuff a little while after we transferred over. And again, yeah, it was just a new option that I hadn’t added in. And so I’m not sure if it’s a new default option that’s now been, you know, added into the new work front experience. So it was actually in one of the latest releases and there is already an idea in the idea exchange for turning it off. So I’ll post that link for you in the chat. Yes, it was a very small line in the release and I didn’t catch it until I went back and looked and said, where the heck did this come from? I should also mention, speaking of idea exchange, you guys should all be getting an email tomorrow. Prioritization opens tomorrow. It’ll be open for two weeks. So the idea exchange twice a year, our products team looks at all of the ideas that came in through the innovation lab and picks 10 or 15 to say, we could work on any of these. Which ones do you guys want us to work on? So you can go into the innovation lab and vote. If you are authorized support contact system admin, you can vote. You have to be logged into work front one to see it, but voting opens tomorrow and will run for two weeks. So add that to your to-do list to make sure you go in because you have submitted the ideas, but now go in and prioritize and upvote those.

I think we’ve gone through all the questions in chat. If I missed something, guys, I was trying to scroll. If I didn’t read something, come off mute or do the hand raise and we can ask your question. But we’ve got 10 minutes left. Is there anything else while we’ve got Betsy and her brain or this group? So I have a use case that I’m trying to decide if work front is the answer for.

I have a group that they would like to use work front to gather documents and have data associated with each of these documents. It would be wonderful if each submission was a single document, but they want to do multiple documents in a single submission, which to me makes me think, oh, my gosh, I have to create field one for document one, field two for document one, and just keep building for as many whatever we limit it to. So say we limit it to five documents.

I can’t create an array for those five documents, so I have to create separate fields for each of those documents.

Am I seeing the whole picture there? Is that kind of how that approach would take place? Yeah, just based on what I’m understanding, that would be it. I don’t know if anybody has seen or done any other ideas, but yeah, I can’t think offhand of any other way to do that. Okay, that makes me think that work front really isn’t the way to go with that type of submission. But thank you. Yeah. You know, I would drop that maybe, Florence, into the community before you kind of, if you have a little bit of time to say like, is it, is it not, drop it in the community and see if anybody else has any guidance, kind of a broader subset of customers. I will, thank you. Yeah, it’s hard with documents. I know, and I’m not just saying on work front, but you know, work front was not initially built as like a document storage program or software. So, but more and more people are trying to do that, right? Because you can connect to it and you’re trying to have an essentialized location.

So there are things that we’re trying to improve in that area. But of course there are other things that are taking precedence over that in particular. So definitely, like Kristen said, I would go community.

I’m not sure if others are using it in that way, other than to just work on your project. And then they’re keeping all of those documents in another location that they just link to from there.

All right, thank you. Yep. All right, any others? Awesome. Guys, this was really good. I know we had a good sized group where we could do a discussion here. Sometimes we use the breakout groups, but I think it was really helpful for people to ask questions and be able to hear what others are doing. So thank you for asking all of your questions. Thank you for having us. Everyone, we would need to have like a library program where we like check out Betsy’s brain. She is one of our learning program managers. So she teaches courses. She builds learning paths. So I think one of the best things you guys can do is look at the learning paths that we have there. Again, they’re on Workfront One. They’re free. If you haven’t taken some, a lot of them are bite-sized. 10 minutes, 30 minutes. So you can see that they’re all on Workfront One. They’re free. If you haven’t taken some, a lot of them are bite-sized. 10 minutes, 30 minutes.

And then I know obviously there’s boot camps as well that are more intensive. But take advantage of those resources for sure. Yeah, and if you ever want to just reach out to the training team, we do have a discussion area where you’re more than welcome to post those questions. And we can help answer those for you as well. So don’t feel like we’re behind the scenes. We’re trying to get more in the front as well. How do people submit questions to the training team? Yeah, so there is that discussion page. And I’m trying to, just as I said it, I was like, oh, I need to find it. But there is a discussion group that you can go to. Let me go to the training resources.

I’m adding it to my list too. So if we don’t have it right this second, I’ve added it to my list. And I’m going to just pop right now into chat. The follow-up thread, again, I’ll send this to you guys. Afterwards in an email, but just so you have it here if you want to pop over now.

And so this will have, right now it has the slides that Betsy shared. It just has screenshots since I know she also did some screen sharing, but it’s got screenshots. And then when we have the recording, I’ll post that there as well here in a few hours. Yep, and I just posted the training discussion page. So feel free to contact us through there. You can also email us.

We just changed our email. You think I’d know that by now, but that’s probably the discussion is the best way to do that. Okay.

This is super helpful. I don’t have any more slides to share, the wrap-up slides. The takeaways I would give you guys, one, Workfront one, right? There’s that discussion thread from here. So if you think of something in an hour and say, oh crap, I meant to ask Betsy that. Add it to that thread. Or if there’s something that you think of that you guys are doing with calculated expressions or with custom forms that you say, I should share this example with the group. Definitely post it there. Let that thread be a continuation of this.

And then in terms of upcoming sessions, I’ve got the Fusion session coming up. And I’m hoping to also do a session on onboarding folks that are only requesters. So people that need to know how to use Workfront, but they’re not your planners. They’re not your people that need to be on the projects. So sometime in October, I’m hoping to do kind of a, how do you enable just the flyby Workfront folks. And if you have examples of that and wanted to share in that session, reply to my email that you’ll get this afternoon. I would love to have more examples there. So, and if you guys have topic ideas, again, I send out the email. It’s not a bot. So you can always reply to those notes if you have suggestions for these or topic ideas or anything. So I’m always open to ideas.

And I think with that, I think we’ve got, you’ve got four minutes left in your day. So use it wisely.

Thank you all for coming. Have a great day. Bye.