Infopath and earlier versions of Office

[Travis]

I've got Office 2002 installed on a couple of my computers and am
entertaining the thought of getting Office 2003 with Infopath on a new
machine I'm going to get in the new year.

I've never used Infopath before but I've read a little bit about it and
know basically what it does.

My question is whether the forms generated will be compatible with the
Access 2002 application I've been working on which runs on my two
existing machines and will soon also be used on other machines in my
office, some of which still run Office 2000.

Or am I going to have to upgrade to 2003 all around? That's something
I'm not keen to do given that a completely new version of Office is due
out next year anyway and if I do upgrade I'd prefer to do it to the
next version rather than the version which is about to replace it.

Travis

 

[Franck Dauché]

Hi Travis,

No you don't need the full Office 2003 to run InfoPath. You can buy it
alone and it can work side-by-side with any other Office version.

Hope that it helps.

Regards,

Franck Dauché

 

[Travis]

What about the forms? I was under the impression that InfoPath could
create distributable forms which could be emailed, put up at inernet or
intranet sites etc.

I thought I could use a single copy of InfoPath to create a whole bunch
of data entry forms which can be emailed to clients, put on web sites
and intranets.

If everyone, including clients, need to be running InfoPath then the
exercise doesn't appear to be all that worthwhile since these days a
significant portion of end users only have the basic four Office apps.

Travis

 

[Franck Dauché]

It depends what you need. If your users are only reading the forms, you can
turn xml into HTML to display the form in IE. Users can also buy third party
viewer (some of them have partial data entry support).
In any case, InfoPath can be bought as a separate product and can be added
on top of any Office product that you might have.

Regards,

Franck Dauché

 

[Travis]

I intend to use the forms mainly as client questionnaires. A read-only
questionnaire isn't particularly useful and I can't expect my clients
to rush out and buy InfoPath just to fill in a questionnaire. I was
hoping to use InfoPath forms for other staff to enter data as well, but
it looks like they will need InfoPath installed.

I've obviously had the wrong idea about what InfoPath does. I'm
particularly confused by what these "distributable forms" are, since I
assumed these could be used for data gathering rather than merely data
display.

So what is the best way to go about creating emailable questionnaires
that can be filled in electronically by clients then emailed back and
imported into a database? Should I do everything in Excel and write a
VBA routine that imports cells and ranges into Access or should I go
out and hire an ASP or PHP programmer?

Travis

 

[Ben walters]

Travis,
InfoPath is as you put it a means for displaying data, the means by which it
distrubutes a form is by copying a tempalte to the users machine and hence
yes it does make the assumption that the user has InfoPath installed on their
machine (this may change in the future just have to wait and see what MS has
up their sleeve) this being said ther are third party tools out there that
will convert an InfoPath form to a HTML form (InfoView is the main one I have
come across), but it is worth noting that the more complex the form the less
useful these tools become.
Your other option of course is to get an asp.net page developed that can
capture this data for you.
I know this doesn't give you any hard and fast answer to what you should do
but does give you some more information
Cheers
Ben

 

[Travis]

I know this doesn't give you any hard and fast answer to what you should do
but does give you some more information

Actually your information was very valuable to me Ben because it has
cleared up my confusion over the "distributable forms". InfoPath seems
to have a number of useful features, but I'm better off putting my
efforts into developing my Access applications and eventually I'll put
my questionnaires online.

Thanks.

Travis