By Annette Marquis, TRIAD Consulting

Without forms, most offices would have a difficult time functioning. During a typical day, an employee might complete a form to request vacation time, submit expenses from a recent business trip, record information about a new customer, and requisition a new job position. As an administrative professional, you are often the one called upon to create the forms that other employees complete.

Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 is the first program in the Microsoft Office System specifically created to assist users in designing and deploying forms. InfoPath is a powerful form-creation program that's based on Extensible Markup Language, or XML, which is the new standard in defining and describing data. By using XML, you can exchange data between programs, regardless of operating environment. For example, you can extract data from a corporate data warehouse that runs on a UNIX server and then use the data in a Microsoft SQL Server database running on Microsoft Windows XP. The best part is that by using InfoPath, you can design powerful online forms without knowing how to write XML code. Although you can create a functional form in Microsoft Office Word 2003 or Microsoft Office Excel 2003, this article will look at the benefits of using InfoPath to create a typical form — an office supply requisition form.

Defining the form

For any form to be effective, you must first be clear about its purpose. Before you create a form, consider the following questions:

• What is the purpose of the form?
• What type of data needs to be collected?
• Who will complete the form? Will it be completed by one person, or will several people need to complete sections of it?
• Who needs to review the form before it is submitted? Are approvals required?
• Do you need to aggregate the data entered into all of the forms or does each form stand alone?

An office supply requisition form, which is designed to define the needs of an individual employee or department for office supplies, is typically initiated by the employee needing supplies. If the items that the employee orders are not stock items, he or she likely needs to get approval from a supervisor. If the supervisor approves the order, he or she forwards the form to the purchasing department or, in the case of small companies, to the person in charge of purchasing. The purchaser maintains a database of all of the requisitions within the company so that orders received and orders outstanding can be tracked. To authorize payment, the purchasing department then forwards information about completed orders to the accounting department.

In many organizations, the requisition process is an inefficient one that requires paper documents, numerous e-mail exchanges, lots of manual data entry, and individual oversight and tracking. Now, by using a single InfoPath form, you can increase efficiency and eliminate steps. InfoPath forms can be a key element in a complex workflow that involves various people and departments entering, approving, and reviewing data.

Designing the form

After you've defined the form, it's time to design the form itself. By using InfoPath, you can choose from a wide variety of form controls — such as text boxes, date pickers, drop-down lists, and check boxes — to include on your form. A typical office supply requisition form, such as the one shown here, might contain all of these controls in a single section.

Add repeating tables

In addition to the traditional form controls, you can insert repeating table controls so that users can add as many rows as they need for specific questions. No more guessing how many rows users might need when they enter data in a table.

Create optional sections

Optional section controls offer even more flexibility, because they appear only when users need them. Therefore, space is not wasted and users are not confused with irrelevant questions.

Allow for file attachments

By attaching related documents (such as purchase orders, packing slips, and invoices) to forms, you can be assured that documents are not separated from the requisition form that refers to them. By using InfoPath, you can insert file attachment controls, such as the ones shown here, so that users can attach related documents directly to the form.

And these are just some of the controls that you can add to InfoPath forms to give them power, flexibility, and usability. Other controls at your disposal include:

• Master/detail sections, which you can use to enter and view detail data related to other data in the form. (For example, the master section might display customer names, and the detail section might display the related customer orders.)
• Choice sections, which allow users to choose how they want to pull data from another data source into a form.
• Picture controls, which allow users to display or attach picture files to a form.

But when all is said and done, no matter how easy it is to fill out a form, having to print it in order to obtain appropriate signatures can stop an online requisition process in its tracks. For the possibility of a truly paperless form, InfoPath offers you digital signatures.

Digital signatures

You can enable digital signatures (an authenticated electronic certificate tied to an individual user's log-on ID) for any or all parts of an InfoPath form. For example, the requesting employee can digitally sign the requisition form, the supervisor can digitally approve the requisition form, and the appropriate purchasing representative can digitally sign the purchasing section of the requisition form.

A digitally signed form confirms (through the Digital Signature Wizard shown here) that it was signed by the appropriate person and that the signed section of the form is locked so that it cannot be altered.

Creating different views

One of the problems with online forms is that they never look great when you print them. InfoPath solves that problem by letting you create different views of the same form. You can create a form that looks great online, and you can create a variation of the form that looks like it was meant to be printed. You can even create views of the form based on a user's log-on ID. By using this option, you no longer have to have a section of a form that says, for example, "For Purchasing Department Use Only." Instead, you can design a view of the form that contains fields that appear only to designated people in the purchasing department.

Each view that you create can have totally different layouts, colors and backgrounds, text formats, print options, and page setup options. By having all of these choices, you can give users a completely personalized experience that's focused on their unique needs.

Deploying the form

When you are ready to deploy the office supply requisition form, or any form you create in InfoPath, you can publish it to a shared network location, to a Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server or Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services site, or to a Web server. SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services have special forms libraries that enhance the management of InfoPath forms.

Regardless of the publishing option you choose, users will find it easy to access and submit the forms that you create. For added convenience, users can even complete forms offline and submit them after they reconnect to the network.

Reviewing and reporting on form data

Purchasing departments need to produce a report of all the office supply requisitions submitted during the current year, showing how long each order took to fill. They also like to be able to see the status of each active requisition in the system. By using InfoPath, they can do both. Because InfoPath forms are based on an XML schema, data entered into an InfoPath form can be extracted easily for reporting in other programs such as Excel, Microsoft Office Access, and SQL Server.

How you extract the data in an InfoPath form depends on your needs and the needs of your organization. It can be as simple as manually exporting form data to an Excel workbook or as complex as automatically connecting to a database when the user clicks a button to submit the form. Your IT department can help you develop the best solution for each form that you develop.

Whether you are creating an office supply requisition form for your entire company or an issue-tracking form for a small project, InfoPath gives you great form design tools, a host of sample forms to get you started, custom views for different uses, efficient data extraction tools, and advanced functionality in features such as digital signatures. With all this at your disposal, the process of creating and deploying forms will never be the same.

About the author   Annette Marquis is a partner of TRIAD Consulting, the premier Microsoft Office System training firm for the International Association of Administrative Professionals (IAAP).