Read and search your responses

Replies land in one place: the Submissions tab of the form that collected them. A tutor working through this week's lesson requests and a garage checking the morning's bookings see the same screen — three counters along the top, a search box, and a table with one row per response.

This article is about reading what came in. Getting it out of formformform is covered separately.

There are two ways in. From your forms list, the Responses button on a form's card goes straight there. If the form is already open, Submissions is the second of the four tabs across the top — Fields, Submissions, Settings, Danger.

Three counters sit above the table. Total is every response the form has ever taken. Today counts only those whose timestamp falls on today's date, so it resets overnight. Views is how many times the public form has been loaded — the number worth putting next to Total when a form feels quieter than expected.

The search box sits above the table, next to Export CSV. Typing filters the rows as you go: partial words match, capitals are ignored, and it looks at every answer in the response — not only the four that made it into the columns. An email domain, a postcode or a product name will find the row even when that field is off the right-hand edge of the table.

It searches the answers and nothing else. Field labels and the Submitted date are outside it, so there is no way to search for "everything from last Tuesday". Clearing the box brings every row back.

Clicking a row opens the submission on its own page: every field in form order, label above answer, with a dash where a question was left blank. Attachments appear as cards showing filename, type and size with a Download button; images also render a preview.

Newer and Older in the top right step through responses in date order without going back to the table — the quickest way to work through a morning's arrivals. Back to submissions returns you to the tab. Beneath the answers sits a short metadata block: when the form was filled, the IP address, and the browser's user agent. A response sent from a device that was offline at the time carries an Offline badge next to its filled time.

Rows on an encrypted form all look alike in the table: a padlock and the opening of a PGP block where the answers would be. Nothing readable exists server-side, so decrypting happens in your browser.

Open the response and the "Unlock with your private key" panel appears. Paste the armored private key you downloaded when you turned encryption on, or use Upload key file to pick the .asc file, add the passphrase if your key has one, and click Decrypt. The answers replace the panel. The key stays in that browser, so the next response opens without asking again — Unload key clears it when you are done, which matters on a shared machine.

Export CSV, beside the search box, downloads every response for that form — not only the rows currently matching a search — newest first, with Submitted At, IP Address, Filled At and Was Offline as extra columns after the answers. An encrypted form exports the armored payload per row instead; you decrypt those yourself.

If you would rather not come back to this tab at all, switch on "Email me on new submissions" under Settings, or send each response onward as it arrives with a webhook or a Zap.