You can use views to offer users different perspectives of the data in a form. All views share the same underlying data source, so you can share controls between views without any problems.
A view is simply an alternative way to look at or present data in a form. InfoPath forms can have more than one view.
If you like, you can create different views for the same form. There are plenty of good reasons to do so. For example, you might use views to:
- Simplify a long, complex form by splitting it up into different views.
- Show different versions of a form to different people based on their role in your organization. For example, in a performance review form, you might create one view for employees, a second view for managers, and a third view for people in your human resources department.
- Create a print-friendly view of your form. For example, you might want to consolidate key information from other views on a single printed page. You can also customize print settings, such as page margins or default printer, which lets you have more control over how and where your form prints.
You can freely copy the controls you need from your main view into other views in the form. That's because no matter how many views you have in your form, they all share the same data source. To illustrate this point, imagine your form has two views. If you have an e-mail text box in the default view, you can copy it into the second view. When someone types an e-mail address in one view, it automatically appears in the other one.
To learn how to add a new view to an existing form, see the Quick Reference Card at the end of the course.
