When you save a form (.xml file) that you are filling out, it can be saved to your local computer or to any shared location, such as your company's intranet or a form library located on a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services site.

Saving a form to your local computer allows you to work at your own pace. For example, if you are filling out a Purchase Order form that is located on your company's network and are unable to complete it before you need to disconnect from the network, you can save it to your hard drive and continue to fill it out while you are offline.

After you finish filling out the form, you can simply save it back to the network or shared location. Saving your form to a shared location provides a simple way for other users to access and view your form.

When designing a form, you are actually creating a form template (.xsn file). You can save the form template to your local computer at any time, which allows you to design it at your own pace.

Note  You must publish your finished form template to a shared location to make it available to other users.

When you save a form template, you can give it a friendly or easily recognizable name. This friendly name will appear in InfoPath in the list of forms in the Fill Out a Form task pane and in the More Forms dialog box when it is opened by a user.

A form template is composed of several individual files, called form files. You can view and work with the form template's form files if you save them to a folder by clicking Extract Form Files on the File menu, which allows you to manually make changes to the individual files.

If you want others to be able to use your form template, you must publish it to a shared location. The InfoPath Publishing Wizard guides you through this process. You can publish custom form templates to a shared location on your computer or company network, to a Windows SharePoint Services site, or to your company's Web server. Using the Publishing Wizard to share your form templates allows you to do the following:

• Create a shared location to store your form template and all forms created from it
• Specify form library columns, if saving the form template to a form library on a Windows SharePoint Services site
• Send a notification to users when a new form template has been published

Because a form template is referenced by every form created from it, it is important to store it in a single location. This helps ensure that all forms based on the form template open and function properly. In addition to ensuring proper functionality, storing your form template in a single location helps simplify managing and maintaining it, because you only have to make changes in one place.