How to gather and display form data in tabular structure

Have you ever thought that you could collect data like in Excel using any WordPress form builder? There are many form builders that let us builder forms and we can collect data via this form but no form builder allow us to collect multiple values of a single field.

For instance we need to collect student data of different classrooms of a college. In this condition every classroom has different number of students of different data. When it comes to collecting this kind of data in simple format, we need to submit every student data one by one and it will take a lot of time to submit every student data one by one. It would be great to use Excel type data collection where we create a multiple column and multi-row datasheet and quickly add data of students of a classroom per row. In this way every row works like a form entry.

How to collect data in a tubular format

Currently there is only one plugin that provides the functionality to collect data just like in Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheet and it is Formidable Forms.

Read review of Formidable Forms

Learn how to add, edit and display form data on frontned via Formidable Forms Pro

How to create a form that gather data in multi-columns and multiple inline rows

Fist of all you need to have Formidable Forms Pro version that costs you some bucks but believe me it worth every penny.
After installing the plugin go to plugin panel and create a form
In right side you will see many field types that you can drag and add in your form. You need to add Repeater section to your form

After adding repeater section, you can drag and drop as many fields in repeater section as you want. All these fields will be added as columns of a single row and you can add multiple rows of these fields as shown in the video given
You need to set Section layout “Grid layout option show data in a grid in Repeater settings

See video how the form layout looks on frontend and how you can enter data

How to access collected data in WordPress admin panel

Go to Formidable > Entries
Select the form from dropdown which entries you want to display

How to display collected data in tabular form on frontend pages

Go to Formidable > Views
Add a new View
See the detailed screenshot below how to configure a View

<table>
<tr>
<th>Name</th>
<th>fathers name</th>
<th>Address</th>
<th>Dues</th>
</tr>
[foreach 144]
<tr>
<td>[147]</td>
<td>[149]</td>
<td>[150]</td>
<td>[151]</td>
</tr>
[/foreach 144]
</table>

Here replace 144 with the repeater section ID can add more fields that are inside Repeater section using <td>[field ID]</td>. (replace red text with id of the field.)

The pink row (colors are just for better understanding) inside [foreach 144][/foreach 144] contains repeatable fields IDs and this row is replicated automatically when more data is submitted in fields that are inside repeatable section.

To display the data add the View shortcode to any WordPress post/page