It's important to be able to get information into Beacon via forms, but it's just as important to know how to get that information out of Beacon! Say you need a hard copy of your form's questions to use as reference without having to go online, or need a quick go-to reference sheet of guests' event registration information with their dietary requirements.

The first scenario mentioned above requires you to be able to print out only the form's questions, blank, with none of the fields filled in, whilst the second scenario requires you to print out the form submitter's answers. Both scenarios are covered below

The short answer is you can't- well, not directly from Beacon. However, you can view the blank form in a new tab, and print from here.

Once the form is open in a new tab on your browser, you can click File and Print on the browser's Menu bar. Hitting Command + P (Mac) / Control + P (Windows) on your keyboard does the trick too.

Form submissions are not always stored on one record type. Instead they will be stored on the record type selected in that form's settings. Here's how you can get all that information out of Beacon as either:

Let's say you have created a sign up form for people interested in adopting dogs 🐾 and you need to print out applicants' answers. On the form's settings you can see where in Beacon each section's answers are being fed into:

In the image above you can see that items in this section are being fed the Person record type.

Read more on form sections and fields here

One way for you to export the information is with an export template! With the export template you can pull the fields from their record types and have them all on one CSV or PDF. For this example, along with the Person record type, we'll also be referencing the Adoption Application and Dog record types (which are custom record types made for this scenario.)

On the export template, you should choose the record type that holds the data you want to export and is one step away from the adjacent record types. In this example, the Adoption Applications record type is linked to the Person record type via the Applicant field and linked to the Dog record type via the Dog field so we will choose Adoption Applications as the record type to export from:

These are the record types you can export from:

You can have the export template order the fields similarly to the order of the questions on the form. Feel free to rename the columns to your preference:

Once the columns are set up you can choose whether you'd rather have the template be dynamic or fixed. You can read more about Dynamic and Fixed filters here.

By filtering the Adoption Application records by applicants who have submitted the form you can find all the people who have submitted the form you want to print.

Don't forget to save the template and you're good to run that export and print.

Alternatively, a Document merge is another way to do this, and provides a spin on how the data is presented. The document merge will generate a word document for each set of answers instead of a CSV or PDF holding all the answers.

First step is to create the template. Referencing the same adoption example from earlier, we know that the record type being we want to generate documents for is Adoption Applications.

In a word processor (e.g Google docs), create a word document that has the tags corresponding to the fields in Beacon. You can find these tags with this handy little cheat sheet that lists the fields along with their tags.

Here's the template made in Google docs with the tags in place of where you want the data to be:

You can then upload and save the template and it will appear on the record's document merge template options. Head back to the Adoption Application record type and select the records you want to print, and click Merge & Download. With the right filter on the Adoption Application record you can find all the people who have submitted the form.

Each record will be saved as a word document and all the documents are downloaded in a zip file with the same name as the merge template ready to be printed 😄

With great printing power comes great environmental responsibility, so consider using soft copies such as PDFs or viewing the information within Beacon before printing (for the trees! 🌲🌳🌴 ).