Like most people, you probably fill out business forms on a regular basis, including expense reports, time cards, surveys, or insurance forms. You may even be responsible for designing, distributing, and maintaining these forms in your organization. You can use Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007, which is part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system, to both design and fill out electronic forms.
In InfoPath, you can do the following:
- Design form templates You can design and publish interactive, user-friendly form templates in design mode. In addition to inserting standard form controls, such as text boxes or list boxes, on a form template, you can insert controls that offer users the flexibility to add, remove, replace, or hide sections of a form. The form templates that you design can range from simple form templates for collecting data from your immediate team to complex form templates that are part of a much larger business process. InfoPath form templates can be used on their own, or you can design them to work with existing databases or Web services. Form templates can be published to and accessed from a common location on a company network, such as a shared folder, a Web server, or a library located on a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services site. In addition, if you have access to a server running InfoPath Forms Services, you can design a single form template that can be filled out either in InfoPath, in a Web browser, or on a mobile device.
- Fill out forms Users can fill out forms that are based on the form templates that are created in design mode. When filling out a form in InfoPath, users can use familiar, document-like features. For example, they can check spelling in their form or insert formatted text and graphics into certain fields. Depending on the design of the form template, users may also be able to merge the data from multiple forms into a single form or export the data to other programs. If a form template is browser-enabled, users who don’t have InfoPath installed on their computer can fill out the form in a Web browser or on a mobile device instead.
InfoPath is based on Extensible Markup Language (XML). When you design a form template, InfoPath creates an .xsn file, which is a cabinet (.cab) file that contains the files necessary for the form to function, such as XML Schema (XSD) and XSL Transformation (XSLT) files. When a user fills out a form in InfoPath, the data in that form is saved or submitted as industry-standard XML. However, you don’t have to know anything about XML to design a form template or fill out a form. The point is that XML can make it easier for your organization to repurpose the data that it collects by using forms. For example, a single InfoPath form template for trip reports can be used to provide XML data to a customer relationship management system, a petty cash system, and a travel planning system.
INFOPATH FORM SERVICES
Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 provides scalable, standards-based electronic forms solutions with enhanced security that can help an organization to extend the reach of forms-driven business processes to anyone with a Web browser. It is a stand-alone server that delivers new Microsoft Office InfoPath® Forms Services, which is also available in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. This new technology uses server-based electronic forms to streamline business processes and make data collection, distribution, and integration more cost-effective than with paper-based forms.
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