Is an Outlook Form appropriate for this?

[Doug Lowe]

Some of our employees work on projects in which they must complete a short
inspection report on a daily basis for the duration of the project. My first
thought was to do this with a Word template, but I'm considering using an
Outlook form with a separate public folder for each project's reports. I've
never done Outlook forms before which is one of the reasons I want to give
it a try. But first I thought I'd run some details by this group to see if
Outlook is appropriate for this app. Might be easier to do it with Access.

Here are some of the requirements:

1. A few of the fields have the same value for each report for the project.
I'd like those to default to the most recent post in the folder.
2. One of the fields is a sequential report number I'd like to generate
automatically based on the most recently used value. (Eg, it the last post
had report number 1001, the next post should be report number 1002.)
3. Printed copies of the reports need to be filed with the client agency,
and the printout must closely resemble the current hand-written report form
now being used.
4. Once each report is created, it needs to be save for posterity but
nothing needs to happen to it -- it's not processed, summarized, emailed to
anyone, etc.

So is an Outlook Form appropriate?

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

This could be done with an Outlook form, but it would require a lot of work, mainly for #3, since Outlook doesn't do WYSIWYG printing of its custom forms.

I would suggest strongly that you look into doing this with InfoPath, especially since you haven't worked with Outlook forms before. Going forward, InfoPath is going to be the Office application used most for this type of reporting task.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers