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Lightning Tools Lightning Forms

Score9.1 out of 10

2 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Lightning Tools Lightning Forms?

Lightning Forms is a SharePoint list form design tool that aims to enable users to improve the logic, layout and styling of responsive SharePoint Forms. Lightning Forms offers cascading lookups, customized buttons with actions, repeating lists integration, tab controls, styling and conditional control formatting, calculations, and expressions. These features help users to build business forms within SharePoint and offers an alternative to InfoPath Forms.


Categories & Use Cases

Media

Screenshot of SHAREPOINT MODERN LIST FORM DESIGN Lightning Forms offers the ability to redesign SharePoint List forms to reflect the business needs. Lightning Forms can be used to transform the SharePoint List Forms such as New Form, Edit Form, and Display Form to meet any business requirements of a business form or business solution. The layout can be improved to suit the needs of the business, add business logic, and include styling and conditional formatting. All of this can be achieved while retaining the modern, responsive SharePoint list forms.
Screenshot of THE CONTEXTUAL DESIGN EXPERIENCE Lightning Forms provides a design experience for SharePoint Modern List Forms with the context of the form being customized. Logic can be tested with existing list items, expressions can be built using existing fields belonging to the list being modified, and changes tested without committing changes to the list. The original design can be restored if needed. Having the context of the SharePoint List within the design tool also means that any environment values such as user profiles and site properties can be used and tested within the design experience.
Screenshot of SHAREPOINT LIST FORM DESIGN WITHOUT CODE OR COMPLEXITY With Lightning Forms, expressions can be built for calculating field values, hiding fields and other controls, adding actions to buttons or the form load experience. The user does not need to be a programmer to accomplish adding business logic. The Lightning Forms expression builder guides the user through expressions. Issues with expressions are explained in the interface and can also be tested without existing from the design experience.
Screenshot of ADDING STYLE TO SHAREPOINT LIST FORMS Modern SharePoint List Forms are responsive, and modern looking. The colours of controls adhere to the theme applied to a SharePoint site. Lightning Tools doesn’t break from that modern experience, but it does allow users to add styling and conditional formatting to any control on a form. This can be used to highlight to users where they have incorrectly completed the form. Tabs can be highlighted, border colours and labels changed based upon conditions to make form completion intuitive.
Screenshot of NEW ACTIONS BUILDER In the new Actions Builder, multiple actions can be dragged into a condition block. The conditions have an ‘If Yes’ and an ‘If No’ section. Therefore multiple actions can be dragged into the relevant sections to save time. The new interface allows users to drag and drop the actions into the sequence that they should run. Drag and drop conditional blocks can be used to save repeating condition rules against each action.
Screenshot of MANAGING VARIABLES Variables can also be used to calculate a value and then retrieve it multiple times. This update saves a lot of time as ordinarily it would need to be completed for each new form.

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Screenshot of SHAREPOINT MODERN LIST FORM DESIGN Lightning Forms offers the ability to redesign SharePoint List forms to reflect the business needs. Lightning Forms can be used to transform the SharePoint List Forms such as New Form, Edit Form, and Display Form to meet any business requirements of a business form or business solution. The layout can be improved to suit the needs of the business, add business logic, and include styling and conditional formatting. All of this can be achieved while retaining the modern, responsive SharePoint list forms.

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Lightning Tools Lightning Forms has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 2 ratings of Lightning Tools Lightning Forms's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Changes to live survey

    Users can make changes to live surveys after they are published.

    Category average: 8.4

  • Data export

    Data collected within the tool can be exported to another program for additional reporting/analysis.

    Category average: 8.6

  • Standard reports

    Includes canned reports that allow users to generate and share accurate survey results.

    Category average: 7.9

Areas for Improvement

  • Compliance

    Supports privacy compliance and confidentiality standards, such as HIPPA.

    Category average: 8.8

  • Custom logo/branding

    Allows the user to include their company logo (rather than the survey vendor’s logo) and/or create a company template so that branding is consistent across multiple surveys.

    Category average: 7.8

  • Multiple question types

    Supports a variety of question types, such as multiple choice, select all that apply, ratings, text responses, etc.

    Category average: 8.7

Reviews

What users are saying about Lightning Tools Lightning Forms.
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Bloody Rippa of a product

Karlheins Sohl
Records Manager in Corporate at City of Marion (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to super-charge our SharePoint sites and specifically the Lists and Document Libraries within them. It's a brilliant tool that works well and also empowers teams to have their own advanced SharePoint users (Site Owners) who can also use this tool.

Pros

  • SharePoint native feeling UI
  • It's expression builder function
  • Speedy performance. It's not laggy.
  • A really well thought through product that meets a really key need in the SharePoint information governance space.

Cons

  • Ability to change text and fonts. i.e. make them bigger, smaller, more colourful, etc.
  • Ability to embed a Power BI widget / webpart into the form. Much like the 'data lookup' data connector.
  • Ability to embed SharePoint calculated columns in the form
  • More example / tutorial videos on difficult use cases and situation, particularly in the use of the expression builder.
  • Owww a Gantt Chart product!

Return on Investment

  • An absolute no brainer purchase for any organisation using M365 as their primary information management system.

Usability

Very helpful tool in providing solutions to a variety of use cases

Ellie WormsleyView profile
Senior Service Designer & Improvement Lead in Information Technology at Trust Housing Association (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

When first starting to use Lightning Forms, we had fairly simple use cases including a light touch Contact Management tool to allow colleagues to request a callback on behalf of a customer, and a Repair Request & Track tool for people to request a repair to their property and track its progress. While simple, these two cases have been largely successful and popular internally.
We are now looking to more complex use cases, including revamping our void property reletting process. This will bring together a number of departments and allow them to work together on each void in a visual way, giving everyone access to real time information and updates. This is particularly vital considering our colleagues work more remotely. We feel this solution is very powerful and is helping us strive to be sector leaders in this area.

Pros

  • Simple user interface - users of the forms intuitively aware of how/where to input information. This is in part due to being able to show or hide different questions or areas of the form, and making them required or not, based on previous answers.
  • Low/simple code - building complex forms with automation and multiple dependencies or lookups is relatively easy once you get started. You have the power of JavaScript to use and do some quite clever things if you can get to grips with it - a lot of solutions are only a Google away.
  • As it is based on SharePoint, it integrates perfectly with the rest of the M365 suite. Things like PowerAutomate enhance its functionality even further.

Cons

  • The styling of the form can sometimes be slightly awkward to use depending on what you're looking to do. For instance, if I was looking to highlight fields that users have missed (left empty), I would need to set up a validation for that question and then set a style for that particular field for when it is invalid. When you have a large and complex form with lots of dependencies, this is awkward.
  • Support for complex and niche issues is slightly lacking in my experience. I submitted a helpdesk ticket for help with a strange issue I couldn't figure out, which took several weeks to get a response to. Because it is niche, it's more difficult to find an answer by searching the internet. Luckily, knowing there is likely to always be a fix if you find the right place/use the right formula, I manage to resolve the issue with some trial and error.
  • It is disappointing that Lightning Forms does not integrate with the MS Lists app. Having the ability to access the form through the list app would add in a lot of useful functionality, including a better experience for users when taking photos to add as attachments.

Return on Investment

  • We changed the process by which site colleagues report repairs on behalf of customers. Instead of emailing them into a shared inbox, they now report them using a lightning form. We have seen a great improvement in the time taken for our team to log the repair issue from the time is arrives with them.
  • We anticipate that streamlining our void property reletting process by using a SharePoint kanban board view with lightning forms (providing a single platform for all things void) will reduce avoidable days vacant and therefore reduce our void loss.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft 365

Usability

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