Microsoft InfoPath 2003 Beta

You may recall a recent article in PCQuest about an upcoming product from Microsoft that allows online form creation and submission using an XML template at the backend (Online Forms: Xdocs and PDF, page 64, PCQuest, January 2003). The product was at that time codenamed XDocs. It has now become a part of the upcoming MS Office 2003 suite and is re-christened

InfoPath.

The name is well chosen as InfoPath allows you to create a set of ‘documents’ that can allow a complete information workflow process to take place. InfoPath allows you to both create and use the forms within the application.



So, how does this work? The InfoPath beta that comes with the MS Office 2003 Beta 2 suite has a fairly good set of template documents already available. To explain what one sees in the application, we’ll use one of these templates–the expense report template–as a sample.

Once you select the template you wish to use, you will see a new form. You can easily fill up this form, and it even responds to certain actions. For example, when you select an expense type as travel, a new form element that was previously invisible suddenly pops up to ask you for the place you traveled from and the mode of transport. 

S N   A   P   S   H O   T Meant for : Office users Key Specs : Text format and table insertion directly in forms; XML format for forms; range of tools such as script editor, object model, editing controls for designing forms Pros : Export forms to other Office apps Contact : Microsoft India, Delhi. Tel : 26294600-12

This sort of interactive form filling almost feels as if someone is guiding you to fill up all the required details without giving you a generic one-off form that you have to try and fit your information into. In many places, the structure of the form itself becomes dynamic enough to take in more information. For instance, when filling up a complex expense report, you can actually segregate different expenses under different project heads by simply copying the structure of one project and pasting it right below it. InfoPath automatically creates the required structures in XML internally and lets the end-user not worry about how the form was created. The way this works is surprisingly intuitive, although reading the documentation makes it sound more complex than it is. Believe us when we say that for the end user it is as simple as doing a standard cut-and-paste as in any other Office application.

The integration of InfoPath into the Office family allows a huge amount of power at its disposal. Things such as IntelliSense, AutoComplete and background spell checking are available to users filling out the forms. So, you can actually right-click on a misspelled word in a form (which is underlined in a wavy red line) and insert the correct spelling there, just as in Word. 



Creating the forms is also a fairly easy job. End users can easily design and implement a form using the designer mode in InfoPath. However, we found that knowing XML would be an advantage that many non-technical users may not have.

Although not really required, sometimes it is required to get into the XML design to tweak the form for some actions. 

This will probably be smoothened out by the time the final version is available. The easiest way would be to use a current sample form and then customize it for your needs.

Once you have created a form template, there are many things that one you do with it. You can distribute this form to anyone with InfoPath and he can use it to fill up information. Things such as validation (for example, e-mail is a valid entry), consistency checks (for example, start date should be before the end date), automatic prompting of more information, all can be included into the file itself. When submitting, the data can be sent to a variety of end-locations–e-mail, database, document, spreadsheet, etc. 

In conclusion, InfoPath offers a new way of collecting data that is error-free, consistent and can be sent to a data-collection center for analysis or for reporting. As it internally uses XML for the form

design, the output of the form can be easily moved into different formats, such as HTML, if required. By becoming a part of the MS Office family, InfoPath draws upon the tried and tested set of features

that have made the Office applications loved the world over.

Vinod Unny