Handling multiple email addresses in a single record

[Matt Ehler]

I’m a band director trying to use TapForms for my school band program. I’m figuring out most things on Tap Forms without too much trouble, but I’m wondering what the best practice would be here:

I have a variable number of parent emails for any given student from our learning management system. Some students will have one, most two, and some have three or more. I’d like to be able to pull parent emails from the multi-column list view as easily as possible to paste into my mail client, but I’ve run into some problems.

If I have an empty cell, it screws up the formatting when pasting it into the To field, so I can’t have empty cells in the region I copy from. But if I have multiple email addresses seperated with a return carriage in a single field, then it wraps them in quotation marks when I copy them out. It seems like there’s no best way to have these copyable from the table view, but I figure there must be some best practice for this.

[Sam Moffatt]

One solution could be to use a saved search to exclude fields that don’t have an email set. That would give you the MCLV without the empty cells if that is problematic.

I’m not sure how you’ve modelled it, if you’re using a simple text field then that doesn’t give you too many options. If you do it as a second form and use a link to form then you might be able to copy the emails out of it via a saved search (you might need to use a calc field to copy down the values). That might be an option for you as well.

Without knowing what your email client wants, you could potentially have a form script generate the emails in a format your email client wants and puts it onto your clipboard for you. It’d have to loop through the records and you’d likely want to work with the search object. Different email clients have different requirements, some seperate on new lines, commas or semi colons so it’s important to know what delimiter character because that might help as well.

Some of these are variants on a recent topic around linking forms. That might be relevant to you as well.

[Brendan]

Hi Matt,

Have you tried using the “Email Selected Addresses…” function in the Edit menu? That will tell Tap Forms to address a new empty email with the selected addresses. Then you won’t have to copy and paste email addresses.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Matt Ehler]

Brendan,

That works great, thank you! What’s the preferred way for delimiting multiple emails in a single field for Tap Forms? Just a comma with no space? Trying to do a return for the delimiter did not work well, and a comma with a space similarly didn’t behave.

[Brendan]

Hi Matt,

Try a semi-colon between email addresses. But I tested comma and semi-colon and they both worked.

Thanks!

Brendan

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