InfoPath Dev

Hi All,

I am about to embark on a sharepoint intranet for the company i work for, i am just after a some help as i am a newbie when it comes to infopath. It is getting rather daunting purely because of the amount of data we are going to need to publish.

We plan on using the Intranet for the following:
1. Sharing Company Policies (already completed in PDF)
I have just been adding these as .pdf's, as they dont need to be edited, sounds ok to me? These will be viewable by anyone.

2. Filling out OHS and HR forms (already have these in .doc format)
WHat is the easiest way to do this? I have been just creating blank forms, copying the .doc data over and adding in the text boxes etc that way. These will also be viewed by everyone.

Weekly paperwork (20 "sites", all with own excel stocktakes etc)
All will have their own /sitename group, which can only be accessed by members of that "site". Will need to lock specific cells to only allow entries in required feilds (just done in excel i assume?), also will have to enable that specific feils have correct forumulae before being able to submit.


I will do doubt have many more questions, but my first is where the hell do i start? What is the easiest way of creating a form from a .doc file? Just copying is as i have been? Or would it be easier to create a template with the rules i want applied to all forms, and then add the info from the completed .doc's into the template?

I am currently just exploring info path using the "sharepointsite.com" trial until the new server arrives early next week.

ANy other suggestion or help is greatly appreciated!

Cheers
Cam

Hi Cam and welcome to our forum!

1. Sounds good to me.
2. I assume you are using InfoPath. Make sure you create a well designed data source - pay attention to both the structure as well as the data types.
3. For the weekly paperwork, yes you can lockdown Excel cells and make the spreadsheet accessible to members of that subsite.

Where to start? Well, creating a good looking InfoPath form will take time. You could export the Word doc as MHTML and copy and paste that into the view in the InfoPath Designer. Use the data source in the taskpane to construct the schema. Delete the areas in the and replace the fields with the data fields using drag and drop.

Good luck

Firstly, thanks for your tips

Ok so things have moved along nicely. Sharepoint 2k3 is up and running with SPS and basic PDF'd policies and infopath forms are up and running, the excel spreadsheets can wait for now.

However, our OHS man has decided he has too much work to do, so instead of having the Infopath forms sent to his inbox, and them him manually enter the data, he want's to know if its possible that is can be done automatically? (does that make any bloody sense?!?!?)

Basically he wants every field from the form to export to a central database (he currently uses excel for his "database"). Is it possible to have the information from the form automatically submitted into an Excel spreadsheet? Or do we have to look at using something else? An infopath database? I really don't know!

He also wants a seperate sahrepoint site that will link out clients to the OHS stats DB, but thats the least of my worries for now!

Sorry if this has been asked a million times before but otherwise i'd be here for days viewing the results :-)

Cheers!

Cam

Ooohh i think i just found the answer to my question...

http://www.infopathdev.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3088&SearchTerms=export,data,to,excel

That'll teach me for not looking through the search results :P

Looks like i need to get my hands on Office 2007!

Any other help or assistance anyone can provide is greatly appreciated!

Cam

Hi Cam,

You may not need InfoPath 2007 to do the Excel dump. If the infoPath forms are being submitted to a SharePoint library and you are promoting all the fields form the form to SharePoint, SharePoint supports a direct export to Excel.

Also for the Word docs you already have InfoPath 2007 does support a direct WORD - InfoPath form import. It works pretty well, you may need to tweak the InfoPath form a little depending upon the layout of the original word doc but it's very fast thing to import docs which saves you a ton of time on the design.

Good luck!

After a bit of research and some testing on my test sharepoint site i came to the same conclusion, glad to see i am kinda on the right track.

Although i had considered scrapping the idea for access DB's, but then i have to teach people to use access (pass!)

Just need to do some more testing to ascertain if it can export the sharepoint data to one excel sheet, rather then creating one per "submitted form". But i really haven't looked that far into it yet.. Anyone else had experience with this?

Thanks alot for the help

Cam