Building Forms for Outlook 2007

Question

I was just introduced to the concept of Outlook forms. I don't know if this will solve my problem but here is what I want to do:

I want to be able to have employees who are inside the company fill out some forms. So all I have to do is create the form and PUSH it to their Outlook? After they fill out the form, can I capture the data somehow? Has anyone does this before? Can someone recommend a good tutorial/examples?

Update: The Outlook->Access option seems like a great one, but it seems like the form must be emailed by someone. In other words, if someone wants to fill out any form they first have to be emailed a form. What if a person wants to just fill out a form? How would he do it if he has no access to the Access database?

Answer 1

Here are three options:

1. This page is a really good jump page for custom forms in Outlook. In fact, that whole site is pretty good with lots of examples and links like Outlook Forms Step-by-Step Tutorial.

2. However, if you also have Access 2007, I'd actually recommend something simpler and easier to create email forms that can be sent to users and collect back all of the information. Once I discovered this in Access 2007 I never went back to custom Outlook forms.

   Basically, you create an Access db with the data you want to collect and then in the "External Data" tab in Access 2007, you click "Create E-mail" and a wizard will walk you through creating an email with the form in the body (which is either HTML or InfoPath, depending on which one you choose). You send this to your users (you can have a recipient list in a table as well in your Access DB) and they fill out the form (I used it for surveys) and then they click submit. It goes back to your Outlook in a special folder and as soon as you open Outlook, it will synch it with the database. Then you can slice and dice all of that database information.

   Here are some great tutorials on this:

   • Demo: Collect data in Access 2007 by using e-mail
   • How to integrate Microsoft Access and Outlook 2007

3. Finally, if you just want to collect back much simpler information, like "Yes", "No", "Maybe", the easiest way is to create voting buttons. Go to New Message -> Options - Voting Buttons. You can customize this if needed by separating your choices with a semi-colon ;.

In #2 and #3 above, these are scenarios to initiate data collection.

There are other situations where someone doesn't need a prompt via email to fill something out right there, but rather just submit a form (like an expense report, or a gas mileage report). #1 above (Outlook custom forms) is generally better choice in that scenario, but:

• Outlook forms have typically been harder to deploy and teach people to use (there are things like "public forms", "private forms", etc.)
• Outlook forms have been, in practice, been replaced by other technologies. In particular, InfoPath/Forms Server and Sharepoint Forms. This is because neither of those two technologies requires users to do a whole lot other than follow a link to fill out a form. I used to know, about 10 years ago, many companies who tried to use Outlook forms and most of them gave up development of them in favor of other technologies.

This isn't to say that Outlook forms are bad in any way. If you don't have other technologies available to serve as a Forms Server, then this could be a decent option to consider.

To look at other semi-lightweight ways of form submission, you can use MS Word templates as the front end and have them update an Access DB. Here are a couple of good articles on this:

1. Import Data Directly from Word Forms to Access Tables
2. How do I... Transfer data from a Word form to an Access database?