A Love Story
What are those things?

Why should I care?
SharePoint Lists

 Lists are ordered, typed data.
 Everything in SharePoint is a list. This includes
surveys, calendar items, announcements, and even
document libraries. *
 If you can store it as rows and columns, with one
unique item (i.e. record) per row, it can be a list.
 You can make your own custom lists, and should.
* SharePoint thinks document libraries are very special, and tries to hide their list-ness from
you. Whether or not it should be ashamed of their actual background, this makes treating them
like regular lists somewhat problematic (i.e. impossible.)
InfoPath

 Consumes and displays list data in a friendly, highly
customizable way.
 It considers many things to be lists, including Excel
files, Access databases, and most of SharePoint.
 Much more powerful than we’re going to cover
today, but it’s worth a close look if you do much data
entry.
 Installed as part of Microsoft Office Premium, but
needed if you’re going to create forms.
Prepare to be Dazzled

If your threshold for bedazzlement is moderately low.
First, make a custom list.

Next, pop into List Settings.

Build out the list. Add questions, move
fields around. That sort of thing.

When ready, click here.

InfoPath should open and attempt to create a default
form that will meet the requirements of the list you
designed. It will look very, very boring.

But you can fix that.

You can add list options
directly within InfoPath.

You can turn text fields into dropdowns, and choice
fields with radio buttons into modal popups. I’m told
that nerds find this very exciting.

Most importantly, you can
add validation rules.

And publishing takes just
one click.

There’s quite a bit more I
could show you.

 Workflow patterns
 Read-only fields
 AD user security
 Anonymous online
submissions
 Multi-part forms
 Branching forms
 JavaScript access
 Direct database access
But I’ll leave you with this.
This…

…is now this:
