Export responses to CSV

A bakery taking standing orders through a form still has to pick and pack from a list. Export CSV is how the Submissions tab becomes that list — one file, one row per response, ready for a spreadsheet, an accountant, or the mail merge that prints the badges.

It is a plain download rather than a report you configure or a job you schedule. One click, and everything the form has ever collected streams into your browser.

The button is on the Submissions tab, immediately to the right of the search box. There is no options dialog: clicking it starts the download straight away.

The file is named after the form's own address. A form living at /f/k3p9/weekly-bread-order arrives as weekly-bread-order-submissions.csv, so a folder of exports from different forms stays readable without renaming anything.

Every field that captures an answer gets a column, in the order the fields sit in the form, headed by that field's label. Elements from the Layout section of the palette — headings, paragraphs, dividers, images, page breaks, the submit button — hold no answer and never get a column. Hidden fields do get one, so a campaign tag passed in the URL exports alongside the visible questions.

Four fixed columns follow the answers: Submitted At, IP Address, Filled At and Was Offline, the last reading Yes or No. Rows are newest first. Both timestamps are written in UTC, not your local time, so a nine o'clock order placed in London in July reads 08:00:00.

A checkbox field's ticks land in a single cell, joined with commas. A File Upload column holds the upload's id rather than the file itself — the attachment stays in formformform, where the submission page shows it with a Download button. Two fields sharing a label produce two identically named columns, which is worth avoiding before the responses pile up.

Answers are quoted properly on the way out, so a long-text reply containing commas, quote marks or line breaks stays inside one cell instead of spilling across the row. Blank cells mean the question was skipped, or was hidden by conditional logic when that person filled the form.

Because rows come out newest first, sorting ascending on Submitted At is usually the first thing to do — that column is already in a shape spreadsheets sort correctly. For a date range, filter on the same column; there is no date filter inside formformform to do it for you.

An encrypted form has no readable answers on the server, so its export cannot have answer columns. It downloads as a different file — weekly-bread-order-submissions-encrypted.csv — with five columns: Submitted At, IP Address, Encrypted Payload (PGP), Filled At and Was Offline.

Each payload cell holds one complete armored PGP block, the same blob the submission page decrypts for you in the browser. The CSV gets no such help: you decrypt those cells yourself, with your private key and whatever OpenPGP tooling you already use. For reading a handful of responses, opening them one at a time in the app is far less work.

The same CSV is available over the REST API at GET /api/v1/forms/{form}/submissions/export, authenticated with a token for the account that owns the form. That is the route to point a nightly script or a reporting tool at.

If what you actually want is each response as it arrives rather than a file after the fact, send it onward instead: a webhook fires on every submission, and Zapier's New Submission trigger does the same for whichever app you connect there. Both are one-directional — a submission triggers an action elsewhere, and nothing flows back into the form.