InfoPath Dev

Hi all:

So.. I discovered Infopath and, I admit it, I went a bit overboard. I got all excited, and I managed to get the whole office excited as well. "They look so nice!"; "They are so easy to fill in...".I was the office hero! But then, when we started creating more complex forms.. THUD. We ran into the "Infopath doesn't really manage printing at all well". The killers are headers/footers ("Fred, why can't we put fields in the footer?"'; "Fred, why does text truncate if it is longer than 4 words?") and page breaks ("Fred, we can't possibly hand this report to the client with the table just running off the end of the page, and no headings on the next page!"). And I realize now, that there are no solutions for this (Infopath 2003). I have led them into the desert, and, the vultures are circling above.

So... what about Infopath 2007? Or 2010? Do they manage these things? No? A little better (please explain)? Yes?

Thanks!

P.S. And, of course, I can't even get a price for Infopath 2010 without talking to a Microsoft Salesperson about a volume license... Does anyone have a ballpark for how much a 10 person license would be? $1000.00? $10,000.00?

It is true. InfoPath does not manage printing well.

Are you saving your data to SQL? (If your forms weren't built to submit to SQL, DBXL can help with that).

If your data is in SQL, SQL reports can be a handy way to address the complexities of printing.

It looks like InfoPath 2010 allows you to add form fields to headers and footers (and I believe that IP 2007 also allowed that). I'm not certain what the support is like for repeating tables and printing -- I don't see any settings on the control that would allow a person to set the header row to repeat on a new page.

Dear Ms. Stoupa:

Thank you so much for responding! The Infopath forms actually don't connect to *any* database - I'm trying my best to convince my management to invest in a database system. Infopath forms give the office a tiny taste of what a more modern information system looks like, and I am pushing these forms in the hope it helps make the case for an new, effective dbms. If a new system were built, then, yes, we could develop effective forms for printing using the front end to the database - I'm an Access enthusiast, and would push for Access as a front end to SQL Server. I could make some killer forms in Access, but, that isn't in place at the moment.

I would still love to know about page breaks in Infopath 2010 ( I assume 2007 does not advance that issue).

And the cost! Even a wild ballpark would give me a sense of whether or not this might even be feasible.

Here's a link to the Office 2010 trial -- you could install just InfoPath so that you'd be able to check it out.

As to pricing, I'm afraid I don't know a thing -- you really may just need to talk to Microsoft for that.... Unless another forum member has an idea?

Dear Ms. Stoupa:

Doh! Thanks for the suggestion - for some reason I didn't think of using a trial version.

I appreciate your assistance. Actually pricing will probably be impossible to determine; I've discovered Microsoft isn't even selling Infopath as a separate product - it appears you can only buy it using volume licensing, as part of an Office suite.

Cheers!

Fred