InfoPath Dev

What is the easiest method to open an Infopath form (xml) in Microsoft word. Does anyone have a simple step by step procedure to get this to work without losing any of the form features.

Can an Infopath form (xml) be opened with outlook also as an outlook form.

I have the office suite 2003 on a windows xp sp2 machine.

Thanks 

It might help if you describe what you need or are trying to accomplish.

If you want to quickly jump from Word to Infopath the easiest way is to just use a hyper link.  Are you wanting to move data as well?

InfoPath is not an Outlook form but could have a hyperlink shortcut or be an attachment to a mail item.

 only I have infopath installed on my computer and everyone else has microsoft word.  So I need to convert the infopath file to a file that ms word can open

That is not really possible.

You can try opening XML in Word but it won't be too pretty.

They either need to get InfoPath, You need to use a Word template, Or you need Form Services to have the InfoPath forms browser based.

Some ideas:

1. Export the form as HTML. File->Export to Web. Save as HTML. Won't be pretty. Open that in Word.
2. Send in e-mail. InfoPath will automatically convert to Word HTML. Won't be pretty. Open in Outlook using Word as e-mail editor.
3. Create a XML Smart Document in Word that resembles InfoPath form. This is a lot of work, but you could then open the XML files directly.
4. SharePoint Forms Server - this is what Clay mentioned.
5. Print to PDF. Have them open that. No Word required. :)

As Clay said, there's a reason why InfoPath editor exists - it's a rich forms editor. Expecting to get that functionality for free in Word doesn't make marketing sense for Microsoft. :)

Happy trails!

In fact, it is not very difficult, in principle, to do:

In Explorer, right-click mouse button on the xml file and select the menu option «Open with». Then specify that you want to open the program Word. And he will!

But few would be kind of strange. A window will appear right where the offer to choose conversion table (xslTransform).

This is already a bit more tricky - most likely you will have to do it manually for each type of InfoPath. This is a simple xsl (xslt) file, which is used by the InfoPath to create representations.

You can, even when designing the form to indicate how to use xsl to transform. For example, the file template.xml add processing-instruction:

< ? xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="http://hgroup.ru/Schemas/infopath/Person/Word.xsl" version="1.0" ? >

How is it done in my example at: http://hgroup.ru/Schemas/infopath/Person/default.html

PS: sorry, on Russian

PPS: Just clicked the wrong button (instead of reply :) ...