This evening I started with Infopath, Yes I was not at the dev-days in belgium, because I had a project to finish :-((.  Now, you will find my whole learning process in my blog in the next few days, weeks or months (depends on how much time I will have).

When starting with infopath, I found it very easy to find my first steps with it.  It was just like using Frontpage.  Here's a screenshot of the clean startup :

Now you can take the tour if you want, and I would recomment this when you never have heared before of Infopath.  I contains some good common info about this tool.  You can open the sample, althought most of them aren't very usefull for the Belgium people, because it's all american.  But neverless, it can't be harmfull to take a look at them.

Now I have already a little project in my mind.  I want to redesign the holiday request sheet of our company, which is created in excel to infopath, so it could be posted on our sharepoint.  Here's a screenshot of the excel file :

Now, I'm going to redesign this sheet in following steps :

• First create the layout of the first 2 blocks (the header block and the block with how much days we have)
• Make sure that the totals are calculated (if possible)
• Create the grid where we can put our holiday's in
• Recalculate values if possible
• Export the file to excel for our accountancy
• Get all info from a SQL DB, when filling in a name, or use another method
• Save changed info back in DB or use another method

As you can see , I have several steps to go.  Well the first step took me about 10 minutes. 

First I create a new template.  When the template is created, a menu is showed, where you can make the layout, choose controls,... .  I created two tables.  Put the correct text in it, inserted our company logo and put the textfields in place (with the correct properties) where the user can fill in some values.  When adding a textbox, you can change it's values by double clicking on the textbox. You get following screen :

You can give a name, set the data type, give it a default value and much more.  for data types you can choose out of : "Text (String), Whole Number (Integer), ..."

As you see, creating the layout doesn't take much of the time.  Now the problem comes, I want a field on the screen which has the result of the sum of some other fields.  More about this solution in the next update.

Finally, a screenshot of my first tryout with infopath.  Only the first two parts are added: