A2003 & Infopath

[jwm]

Has anyone employed InfoPath to develop forms for an Access application,
and, if so, what are the strengths/weaknesses of Infopath when used in an
Access environment?

TIA

 

[Brendan Reynolds]

You can't use InfoPath to develop forms for an Access application. You could
certainly use InfoPath to develop forms that will be used to view and/or
edit data that is stored in a Jet (MDB) database, but that is not an Access
application. Similarly, if you're using InfoPath, you're not 'in an Access
environment', you're in an InfoPath environment.

More than that, I can't say. While InfoPath initially looked interesting, I
lost interest as soon as I heard that it was only going to be included in
the Enterprise edition. I just can't count on enough of our customers
installing the Enterprise edition to make InfoPath a viable development
platform for us.

If you're interested in using InfoPath forms with Jet databases, there's an
article on that subject at the following URL ...

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011199501033.aspx

 

[Larry Linson]

Has anyone employed InfoPath to
develop forms for an Access application,
and, if so, what are the strengths / weak-
nesses of Infopath when used in an
Access environment?

InfoPath doesn't have as much capability ("richness", "robustness") as
Access for application development.

Brendan is correct in his comments -- licensing costs, unless the company is
going to license InfoPath for other purposes, would be an unnecessary
expense (you don't have to buy many user licenses to pay for Visual Studio
Tools for Office 2003 to be able to deploy with the Access runtime).

There are, likely, some not-so-common application requirements that could be
satisfied with a combination of InfoPath, Jet, and Access, but I don't have
any clients or colleagues who've implemented such an application. I'd
hesitate to call it an end-user development tool and Access a developer's
development tool, because my initial views were that it might be a little
too technical for most end users.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP

 

[jwm]

Thanks to Brendan and Larry for their posts regarding my question...they
saved me a lot of effort in this regard.

Ciao...