Form Forge keeps every submission in your WordPress database, searchable and filterable in the admin. But sometimes you need to hand off data to someone else — a spreadsheet for a colleague, a PDF for a client, a CSV for an external analytics tool. Form Forge exports both, per-submission or in bulk.
From the Submissions view of any form, click Export as CSV to download every submission for that form as a single CSV file. The first row contains column headers (the field labels), and each subsequent row is one submission with fields in the same order as the form.
Apply filters (date range, field values, submission status) before exporting and Form Forge only includes the matching rows. Useful for partial exports — “submissions from last month,” “only paid ones,” “only from Germany.”
Optionally choose which fields to include in the export. Skip internal fields, debug fields, or fields you don’t need in the CSV. Settings are remembered per form for repeat exports.
CSVs are exported as UTF-8 with a BOM so Excel, Google Sheets, and every other spreadsheet app opens them correctly — no garbled characters for names with accents, emoji in free-text fields, or non-Latin scripts.
For forms with tens of thousands of submissions, CSV export runs via the Forge background job queue to avoid PHP timeout. You click Export, the job runs in the background, and you get a notification with a download link when it’s ready.
Every submission in the admin has a PDF link that generates a printable PDF version — form title, submission ID, date, and every field value in a clean, readable layout. Styled with Form Forge’s design system and your form’s branding.
PDF generation runs through our managed backend (Forge API) using a headless rendering engine. The result comes back as a download-ready PDF with consistent formatting across all operating systems and browsers.
If the Forge API isn’t reachable, Form Forge falls back to local HTML generation with a print dialog — good enough for most users and fully functional offline.
Attach a PDF copy of the submission to the email notification sent to admins or submitters. Useful for:
Enable per form in the notification settings.
On the frontend, you can also expose a “Print submission” view so users can print or save their own submission as a PDF at any time.
Form Forge’s CSV format is designed to be re-importable. If you need to migrate submissions between sites, export from the source, import on the destination. The format preserves field names, types, and metadata.
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CSV export is included in every version of Form Forge. PDF generation is included in every paid plan.