Re: uber newbie dev question

Clay Fox — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 14:27:40 GMT

Hey there, welcome to the forum.

I too have worked in and still do consulting for government entitiies and I know how it is in "hostile" IT environments. InfoPath is a great tool for forms and a liberator for knowledge workers and employees in government if you can get the few things you need.

Ideally, best practice for an enterprise solution such as this would be to store the final data in a backend SQL database and use web services Qdabra Database Accelerator Suite Version 2.1 - Developer, but this would require IT involvement. In some cases, the powers that be have made this happpen, in other cases, departments have put in their own "dedicated workstation" (server) to accomplish this themselves.

I would recommend an intermediary solution, get something going rapidly and get your proof of concept so you can lobby for doing it right later. It won't be as good or easy as doing it right the first time but that is the whole philosophy there anyway right? :)

So I would create an Access database with all of the fields you need. It can be one table or a parent table with one or more child tables. You should have a file share or SharePoint or somewhere you can put this table where everyone can access it. Not best practice but your only option without a server. Create a new InfoPath form as a database type connected to your Access Tables, use the design views and layouts to make it wizard like for the data entry, to give the info collectors happy. Create a second view in your form for the data checkers or the next process or it could be another form. Last make a summary view, a repeating table of the data for the "report" and the analysis. Also you can setup a spreadsheet that connects to the data and allow people to analysis the data that way and just the input can occur via InfoPath.

Otherwise if you need some consulting to either train you or help with the project you can purchase some support credits on the http://www.qdabra.com site.

Good luck and have fun.

uber newbie dev question

deadlight — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:15:05 GMT

Hello all, I'm new to InfoPath but I've had college courses in Access and Excel. I've been tasked with creating a form from an existing Excel spreadsheet that gets filled out twice a day every day. The goal of this new form will be that information is easily entered and accessed by computer illiterate people. Accessing data can be organized in such a fashion that the data can be shown in a spreadsheet like fashion by month and/or years of data. The powers that be suggest using InfoPath to accomplish this task. My questions are:1. Does this seem like something that can easily be accomplished with InfoPath?

2. Am I right to assume that I’ll need multiple InfoPath forms? (One to edit data, one to input data, and one to view data)

My problems are:

1. I work for the federal government and am using Office 2003 to accomplish this task. We are upgrading to Office 2007 in a month but this project needs to be done ASAP.

2. I work for the federal government which means that I can’t install anything that isn’t already on this computer and have no access to the servers

Any help would be appreciated

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Re: uber newbie dev question

uber newbie dev question