Build a form
Describe what you want in plain words, or paste your spreadsheet. The assistant does the rest.
Two ways to start
Both of these work as-is, typed into ChatGPT or Claude once CalcForms is connected:
- "Build a quote form for my fence company. Ask for yard size, fence type, height and number of gates. Wood is $28 a foot, vinyl is $38, add $350 per gate. Show the customer the total."
- "Here is my pricing sheet. Turn it into a form my customers can fill in." (then paste the sheet)
The assistant creates the form, previews it, and shows you the public link once you publish.
Changing a form
Ask for changes the same way you built it: "add a rush option that adds 20%" or "hide the margin field from customers." Edits to a published form go live at the same link.
What your customer sees on the form, and what is shown only to you
A calculated field is shown on the form only if you choose to show it. That is how a quote form can show your customer a total while your cost, margin, markup or commission fields are never shown on the form. Every submission still records every result, shown or not. Those results are shown only to you: in ChatGPT, in your email copy of each reply and in your exports.
The formulas and lookup tables are part of the page, so someone who reads the page source can see how a result is worked out, and what it comes to for their own answers, including a result you do not show.
What the engine supports
Arithmetic, IF and nested conditions, lookup tables, VLOOKUP-style matching, percentage and tiered pricing, PMT and other loan math, multi-step forms, conditional fields, file uploads, and an optional PDF quote.
The form shows its results as your customer types. Depending on the form, they are worked out in your customer's browser or on our servers. When the form is submitted, CalcForms works everything out again on our servers and saves those results, so the results you see are the ones our servers worked out.
Spreadsheet functions you can use
A form's calculations can use these functions, written the way you would write them in Excel or Google Sheets:
- Logic: IF, IFS, SWITCH, AND, OR, NOT, XOR, IFERROR, ISBLANK, ISNUMBER
- Rounding and limits: ROUND, ROUNDUP, ROUNDDOWN, TRUNC, CEILING, FLOOR, MIN, MAX, ABS, MOD, SIGN
- Totals: SUM, COUNT, AVERAGE, MEDIAN
- Lookups: LOOKUP and CHOOSE, and lookup tables; a sheet's VLOOKUP becomes a lookup table, and XLOOKUP and INDEX with MATCH are worked out on our servers
- Loans and money: PMT, FV, PV, NPER, RATE, NPV, IRR, SLN
- Dates: TODAY, NOW, YEAR, MONTH, DAY, DAYS, DATEDIF
- Math: POWER, SQRT, EXP, LN, LOG, LOG10, PI
- Text: TEXT, CONCAT, LEFT, RIGHT, MID, LEN, UPPER, LOWER, TRIM, VALUE
Your sheet's formulas work as they do in the sheet. A function CalcForms does not have is named when the form is built, not guessed.
Three patterns quote forms use
- A minimum charge. $2.50 a square foot, never less than $150:
MAX(150, area * 2.5) - Round to the nearest $5.
ROUND(total / 5, 0) * 5 - A tiered rate. $3 a square foot up to 1,000, $2.75 up to 2,000, then $2.50:
IF(area <= 1000, area * 3, IF(area <= 2000, area * 2.75, area * 2.5))
Or say the rule in plain words and the assistant writes the formula: "Never charge less than $150."