About form design
When designing a form in Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003, starting with a blank form provides the most flexibility and allows you to create a design that best fits your needs. While you are free to experiment and work the way that suits you best, following the steps below may save you some valuable time and effort.
Whenever you enter design mode, Office InfoPath 2003 displays the Design Tasks task pane, which contains links to design tools in the recommended order of design tasks. These tasks are listed below, and provide useful information on how to design a form.
Note If you have task panes turned off, you can show them again by pressing CTRL+F1 on your keyboard. Or, to access the Design Tasks task pane at any time, click the Design Tasks button on the Standard toolbar.
1. Create a form layout
Before you begin adding items to a new, blank form, consider creating a form layout. Layout tables help to define the dimensions and order of your form's sections and areas into which you'll place text, images, and controls. From the Layout task pane, you can drag various layout tables, optional sections, and repeating sections onto your form. This task pane also provides easy ways to customize layout tables using familiar Microsoft Office 2003 table-editing commands, such as adding rows and columns, and splitting and merging table cells.
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2. Add controls to your form
When you have finished creating your form's layout, you can add functionality to your form by inserting controls. The Controls task pane provides access to all of the controls that Office InfoPath 2003 supports. Double-click or drag controls onto the form to design its functionality. Based on the choices you make in the form's design, users filling out the form will be able to type text into text fields, make selections from option buttons and check boxes, choose entries from lists, and click command buttons to carry out commands.
3. Bind controls to the data source
After you place and format controls in your form, you must bind them to the form's data source. If controls are left unbound, none of the data that form users type into the form will be saved. Office InfoPath 2003 automatically creates an XML data source when you create a new, blank form and add controls. If you're working from an existing XML Schema or data source, you will be prompted to bind your controls as you add them to your form's layout. In either case, you can use the Data Source task pane to view the structure of your form's data, show and hide details for each of the fields and groups, and modify their associations.
4. Create custom views
By default, every form that you open or create in Office InfoPath 2003 has a default view. While the default view is suitable for most forms, multiple views of the same data provide the ability to look at the same information in different ways. For example, a manager might want to see a summary view of an employee's detailed status report. In Office InfoPath 2003, you can modify the default view and create custom views, including print views that specify custom print settings for users filling out and printing the finished form.
5. Publish the form
While you can save the form you are designing to your local hard drive at any time, you must publish your finished form to a shared location in order to make it available to other users. Before you publish your form, you should test its layout and functionality to make sure it looks and works as expected. In design mode, you can use the Preview command to view your form exactly as it will appear to a user who is filling it out. When everything looks fine, use the Publishing Wizard to publish your finished form to a shared folder on your computer or your company's network, to your intranet or Internet Web server, or to a Windows SharePoint Services site.