InfoPath 2010 Solution Part 2. ~ Blog moved to www.jasperoosterveld.com

Hi, in my previous post I described how to setup a simple declaration form. The form only contained a standard look and feel and can use some adjustments. In this blog post I want to show you how easy that is.

Themes

InfoPath 2010 comes with a great set of out-of-the-box themes for your form. Use the ribbon to go to 'Page Design'. You can see the themes here:

Just click on the arrow symbol (

) to see all the available themes. Just select one and you can see the change immediately. Aren't satisfied with one? Just select another one. It is that easy. I select the first 'Professional' theme and the form will look like this:

Now I want to add a company logo to the form. I press enter before 'Declaration form' and go to 'Insert' in the ribbon and select 'Picture'. I can now browse for a picture I want to show in the form. I add our company logo and move it to the left part of the form. The next thing I want to do is make the labels of the fields more prominent in the form.

I select the labels and give them the font style 'Normal'. I use Bold and remove the Italic selection of the labels. I also remove some unnecessary spaces in the form and move the text ´Total amount´ to the right. The form now looks like this:

This already looks a lot better. It is also pretty easy to make fields mandatory. The only thing you have to do is select a control and check the box 'Cannot be blank' under 'Properties'. See the following figure:

The next thing I want to change is using a currency symbol in the amount fields. I select the controls and go to 'Control Properties':

I go to 'Data type' and change it into 'Whole number (integer)'. I click on 'Format' and the following screen will appear:

Now I select 'Currency symbol' and choose the euro symbol. The last thing I want to change is the text 'Insert item' in our table. To do this I open the properties of this control:

The only thing I have to do is change the text under 'Show insert button and hint text' and confirm with Ok. I will change it to 'Insert new declaration'. The form will now look like this:

We can all agree this looks a lot better J So my advice is to play with all the look and feel options until you got it right. It is pretty easy and straightforward. In my next post I will go more into data connections as promised.