Advanced Features When Assigning Fields to a Document
Once you understand the basics of placing fields onto your document, you can turn your attention to a few other features and tips that will help you customize the fields you've assigned more.
Remember: As you are placing fields on your document, you can use keyboard functions to tab into and out of fields, hit "enter" to interact with them and "escape" to exit:
Field Alignment
When the "Suggest Fields" setting is enabled, it will detect any blank lines in the document and help you align the field boxes on those lines:
Resizing Field Boxes
Another useful feature with the field boxes is the ability to resize the font or the length of a field by dragging the corners of the field to the desired size/length:
For text fields, the size of the font and the field itself can only be enlarged to a certain extent.
To make the text field continue onto the next line, hit "enter" and the field will grow automatically. Alternatively, you can enable the "fixed width" feature and this will require the text to carry to the next line when it reaches the width of the text box:
Take note that if you resize a field to a certain size, it will remain that size the next time you select it unless you change it by dragging the corners of the field again.
Advanced Text Field Features
Within the text and date field boxes is an "Advanced" option:
Adding Labels To Text Fields
To change the text that the recipient sees when they click to fill out a field, you can add a label. For instance, instead of keeping "text" you could enter instructions like "Enter First Name":
Then your recipient will see these instructions when they are filling out the form:
Autopopulate Text Fields
Any text fields that have the same label will autopopulate on-click as long as one of them has been filled out:
Even when no labels are set up, every time a text field is completed, an autopopulate drop-down with text from previously completed fields will be available:
Field Validation
You can also set field validation so that the recipient must enter the characters that are required, for instance, "numbers only":
Date Fields
With the date fields, clicking on the "Advanced" button will give you the option to change the date format, depending on what works best for you:
You can also adjust the date field format on the account level in your Account Settings:
For contracts that require a time stamp as well as a date, you can select this date/time format in the Advanced -> Date Format setting:
Lock Signing Date
Date fields have an option that locks and automatically completes them with the signing date. To enable this option, turn on the "Lock Signing Date" feature in the date field:
With this enabled, the date field will automatically populate when your recipient/s begin signing their document.
CheckBox Group Fields
CheckBox Groups are a great way to set requirements in place for the checkboxes. Validation is done within one checkbox group, this will ensure that the signer is forced to select one but not both of the boxes.
You can also mark the entire CheckBox group to be Required. When you add a checkbox to your document, click on it and you will see a "+" icon below the box.
When you click on it, you can make a group of checkboxes and use Selection Requirements in the Checkbox Group to require that "Exactly 1" box is checked, for example.
In Advanced Settings, add a group name to associate selected field names with specific checkbox groups for future reference or integrations.
CheckBox groups are a great way to make tabbing through fields on a document easier. This can make things simpler to group your checkboxes rather than adding individual ones to a document.
Requiring Fields
Finally, you can choose to make fields required or not required by clicking on the "yes" or "no" button below the recipient's name:
If a field is required, there will be a red vertical line next to it. If it is not required, the vertical line will be grey:
Make sure your fields are correctly set to required or optional before sending your document.