Quask Formartist 3

Takes the drudgery out of creating website forms.

Price: £151.59

Manufacturer: Quask

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Verdict

Pros:

Easy to create forms; integrated data management.

Cons:
Most advanced features only supported on Pro edition.

Verdict:
A good tool, although the interface can be fiddly. For greatest flexibility you'll have to pay a high price for the Pro edition.

Nigel Whitfield, Personal Computer World 17 Feb 2004

Creating forms is one of the really dull parts of designing a website. If you want to do anything meaningful with the data, you need to capture it in some way. So, to avoid mistakes, you must include code to validate the information that is entered and make it all look easy to use. In short, it's a chore.

Quask's Formartist 3 is intended to take much of the work out of creating forms, but in fact it does a lot more. It provides a graphical design environment for your forms and turns the designs into HTML that works with any version 4 browser or above. It also uploads them and their scripts to your web server, ready for people to fill in. The Standard and Professional editions can also retrieve the data from files on the server and display it in tabular form, export to an Excel worksheet or even to SPSS for the Pro version.

The main interface should be familiar to anyone who has used desktop publishing packages; tabs at the base of the document take you to different pages, while icons down the left allow you to add various elements - text, input fields, buttons and checkboxes - to your form. There are templates to get you started, but it's all straightforward, with the usual alignment and 'move to back' type of design tools.

There are some things that took a while to figure out, though; there's no option to add radio buttons, a staple of web forms. Instead you must add a checkbox area, install multiple checkboxes and specify that only one can be selected. We'd also like a proper floating properties palette, instead of the properties window that appears when you click an object and press F3. It would be useful, too, to have a simple option for the form properties to redirect to a particular page afterwards; you can do it using the built-in scripting language, but this is a very common need.

When your form is finished, it can be deployed. First, create a deployment option, which consists of the details of your server, and then close the form and deploy it to a server supporting PHP or ASP scripting. Much like Actinic Catalog, the software will check that everything is working, so no programming is required. However, you do need write access to a folder on the web server for the data files that the Standard edition and above use. We have grave reservations about the suggestion that this is the cgi-bin directory; the Presto edition only sends form results by email.

Once the form is deployed, for the Standard and Professional editions you can retrieve data from the server and view it in tabular form, or export it for analysis elsewhere. But you can't edit the form without recalling or deleting it from the server first. In other words, change the name if you want version 1 to stay online while you work on version 2. And forget amalgamating the data within Formartist - stored data from a form is deleted when edited.

Those niggles aside, there are some good touches, such as the emoticons - a range of graphical sliders that can be used on your forms as survey options. That said, of the 20 or so included, we felt only one was really professional; many are too cartoonish and frivolous, unless you pay for an add-on pack that includes another selection.

Other useful features include the ability to automatically display poll-style results when someone submits a form, and - although only included in the Professional version - random ordering of questions. This should help provide more statistically valid answers. You can also add Javascript to forms in that version.

This is an easy way to take the drudgery out of designing forms and polls for your website, but it could do with a few tweaks to make the interface more friendly for those used to web development tools. The price jump for the advanced features of the Professional edition is also considerable, especially when most people will find the Standard version is adequate for their needs.

Contact: Quask 020 7738 9777
www.quask.com

Price Details:
Presto edition £34.07 (£29 ex VAT)
Standard edition £151.59 (£129 ex VAT)
Professional edition £645 (£549 ex VAT)

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