I'm gonna go through kind of the three stages that I see for form authors where lists are concerned.

I'm betting that most all of you have moved past stage one, you're all solidly comfortable with stage two, and maybe you have not yet moved on to stage three. I'm gonna show you all three of those stages.

Stage one, your, beginning form user is gonna look at a form like this that is creating a will.

They're gonna add a q and a table, and they're gonna say, okay. I need the name of the will maker, perhaps signer name here, name of signer.

Don't worry. I'm not gonna type all of these.

And they're gonna say, okay. Then I also need the spouse's name, and I need the name of the first kid, the name of the second kid, the name of the third kid. How many kids do I want to allow for? Well, let's allow for four kids, and if there's more, I'll deal with it then. I also need the name of the first personal representative. Let's out allow for maybe up to three personal representatives.

And they move along in that way, adding slots for trustees and, guardians and so forth.

That stage went pretty quickly.

They find that building, sections like this where we have to list the children in a narrative format are very difficult and they end up drafting these parts of the documents by hand.

They don't take advantage of the document automation at all for those sections.

So they will move on as you have to an understanding of lists and series type answers. So now instead of asking all of these kid questions, they'll just ask a single kids question and they'll make it a series type answer and do the same with the personal representatives and the guardians and so forth. That's stage two.

Stage three is the one we're gonna spend some time on here because I'd like to see our expert users aware of of this possibility.

What I like to do is create kind of a universal grid, that handles parties, whether they're people or companies, any sort of entity at all.

Sort of a universal grid that I can repurpose and use in most any form.

So in this form, let's build it here. I will add a grid. I'm just gonna put two columns in this one, but this grid is going to expand and contract the number of columns depending on what form I'm using it in to accommodate all of the information that's needed in that particular form. In this particular form, the instructions for this grid are gonna say, list all the parties, will maker, spouse, personal representatives, trustees, kids, guardians, etcetera.

I will encourage the form user to just dump everybody into this one structure of parties.

And then when I name the columns, the fields in this grid, I'm gonna use universal names that are gonna be sensible in just about any form that I ever create. I'm gonna call this first column party, name.

I'm using the word party instead of the word person because I wanna be able to put companies in here as well, and party is a nice generic term that will cover everyone.

And then over here in this particular form, I'm gonna need a city and state field.

Party city state.

I might actually split that into two columns too, so that I would have more flexibility for that. But since I started with two columns here, I'm gonna just stick with it. So I've in this particular forum, I've just got two pieces of information about each party, their name and their city state.

I would type some nice headings here for the form user, and then, I have space there for them to let me click add a few times so that they have plenty of space to work in to type in all the parties.

Then up here in the q and a table, I'm gonna use what I think of as roles.

I'm going to using this, listing of party names that's been provided by the form user, I'm gonna assign assign those various parties to roles in this particular document.

In this particular document, we have a signer.

We ask for the name of the signer, and that role, will be filled by someone from the big list. So I'm gonna put in a smart answer, which asks the form user to make a choice rather than retyping anybody's name. They're gonna make a choice from a drop down box. The source of that drop down box is going to be another answer in this form, and the other answer is going to be the party name column of this grid.

So let me type in a few names here. This is text. Actually, I would make it text with pronouns so I have access to their genders as well.

I'm gonna type in a few sample names here so you can see how this works. Also, when I arrange things this way, the form user has to fill in the grid before they answer any of the questions in the Q and A table up above. Since that's not a top down sort of arrangement, they're not going to intuitively know that they're supposed to do that. So when I'm using this arrangement, I always add a divider at the very top of the q and a table with some instructions for them that say, fill in the grid below first, then, answer these questions.

I might even to direct their eye a little more, I might say, fill in the blue grid below, and then down here, I'll make this whole thing blue so they know what I'm talking about.

Color blue. So now it's pretty clear. I'll give them an instruction right up at the top. Maybe I'll even highlight it with color or something so it stands out, make it bold with flashing lights, whatever you need to do so that they clearly understand what they're expected to do. So they will then come look down here. They'll type in some names down below. I'll just type in two for for now.

Seattle, Washington, Jane Smith is a she, and she is in Tacoma.

And after they have filled in the grid with a whole series of people, then they'll come back up here. When they go to answer the first question, there's nothing here for them to choose, but hopefully they'll notice the little tag here that says, click refresh to update choices.

They'll click refresh, and that's when all of those various names they've typed down below become available, not just in this question, but in all of the questions which are using this, roles technology to fill in roles.

So for the spouse's name, we'd have another very similar smart answer. It's a choice type answer. It uses a drop down box, and the source of the choices in that drop down box is another answer in the form, and the answer is the party name column in the grid, just the same as the previous one. For the kids, this is a series type answer. I'll go into the smart answer form. It's a series type answer, but it's a series not of text boxes where they have to type stuff in themselves, it's a series of drop down boxes. Each one of those drop down boxes has as its source another answer and that other answer is the party name column in the grid.

And I'll click plus a couple of times just so that it's visibly apparent that I'm asking the form user for a series of answers. And each one of those items, they get to choose a name from the list down below. No retyping. Everything entered only once. I do the same thing for the personal representatives and so forth.

One massive advantage here is that having typed in a single person's, name down here in the grid, I can use that name to fill multiple roles.

The spouse is probably also gonna be a personal representative.

The kids might also be personal representatives.

There's no retyping. I can type a name in once down here, and I can use it over and over again up here and to fill various roles, and no extra typing required. Another nice thing is the form user is able to independently control the order in which these people appear and that order may be different depending on what role is being filled. Maybe the list of kids goes in order from oldest to youngest, but those kids when being assigned to their roles as personal representatives, the youngest kid is the first personal representative, then the spouse, then the oldest kid. It's all a mishmash, and this structure allows the forum user to dictate the order of people differently in each role.

So that is the third stage of expertise regarding lists. It works out really well.