Is it possible for respondents to save a partially completed form and come back to it later?

With Paperform, your customers and visitors can have their form data auto-saved, so they can return and complete the form on the same device at their convenience.

This is helpful because:

  • The submitter can close the form and open it again later to finish.
  • If someone accidentally closes a tab, they won’t lose any info.

To activate this for your forms, go to Configure → Form Behaviour and toggle on “Automatic save and resume later."

Screenshot of the "Form Behaviour" settings found under Configure → Form Behaviour. The toggle labeled "Automatic save and resume later" is highlighted (in the lower-right).

This tells the visitor's browser to save answers locally until a form is submitted. They must return to the form using the same device and browser (excluding incognito/private windows) in order to see their previous answers.

Gotchas

  • This does not mean that you will automatically have partially complete data from your customers/users—their computer will remember the data locally, but you won’t receive it until they hit the submit button unless your plan comes with Partial Submissions.
  • Once submitted, they can’t return and edit their form data by completing the form again.
  • By default, previously-saved answers will overwrite any answers entered via pre-filling. For this reason, it's recommended to turn this setting off if you need to test pre-filling into a form. Alternatively, you can add the parameter force=1 to give your pre-filling precedence over auto-saved answers.