InfoPath Dev

Hi

 After months of canvesing senior managers within my organisation they have finally taken the bait and asked me to provide a simple prototype of a Infopath form, trouble is I know what Infopath can do but have never used it seriously!

 What the prototype needs to do...

1.  I have three existing Word form templates, each with some identical fields, each has a different print layout

2. I need to create a single Infopath form template (presentation not important) that will allow population of all fields from the 3 forms, using dropdowns that will guide users through form completion based (want to show of Infopaths functionality!).

3. Once complete I would like to be able to print the form so I end up with three forms with all the fields completed and in the same format as the current word template (this is required for legal reasons)

 4. If possible (but not essential) the ability for a user to save the three forms in word format once complete?

 At this time I am not concerned with auto population of fields from other systems, or integrating with Moss etc, just a simle demo to get approval for a formal project

 Is this something a newbie can self teach himself in a couple of days or have I promised them too much??

 Any help, guidance appreciated

Cheers

Hi ReginaldDean and welcome!

Excellent question! Good for you asking it before you get started. That shows foresight. I think the biggest challenge you will have is step 3 and 4, which essentially boil down to the same thing: you need to move your data into Word after input. InfoPath comes with Word integration. You can create Word print views and just save the resulting Word document. Whether or not this will look like your current Word documents, though, is the challenge. Specifically, some things aren't supported in IP2003 (fields in footers/headers), and there are still limitations in IP2007. While it's definitely not impossible, it will likely take you 1-2 weeks to figure out the Word integration piece and that's assuming you have the patience to read through the samples/tutorials and bang your head against a few walls. Another approach is to just submit the data to SQL and use a third party tool like xPertDoc to pull it into Word. You can use your existing Word docs in both cases. You have to set up bindings from the fields in Word to XML and attach the InfoPath XSD schema to the form. I'm not sure which is easier. xPertDocs is something that is also hard to configure, but it works fairly well and has support for more things.

Bottom line, the Word integration will be a swamp. Make sure you wear boots.