Form Filling Through Office 12

Qa32 writes "For those chomping at the bit for more Office 12 details, Microsoft offered a tiny peek at the upcoming offering, or offerings, due next year. In what he termed the first public viewing of Office 12, Chris Caposella, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group, showed off a distributed forms capability that would enable customers to fill in and submit XML forms easily via a browser, without having to run Microsoft InfoPath on their PC."

Comments

So...

[eggz128]

Like you can do with PDFs today (and for the past couple of years)?

WTF is InfoPath?

[ari_j]

Besides the blurb being simply a quote from the beginning of the article, it doesn't provide any of the background information that we need. There are many of us who are curious enough about the story to justify it being on the front page of Slashdot but who don't know enough about the buzzwords and products named in the blurb to figure out how it affects us.

Re:WTF is InfoPath?

[MHobbit]

InfoPath is one of the programs in one of the Microsoft Office 2003 packages. It allows XML form creation and editing; you can create forms that people could fill out online.

Re:WTF is InfoPath?

[VP]

InfoPath is to Information what PsychoPath is to the Psyche...

Uh huh.

[AKAImBatman]

A multi-billion dollar company places its best people on creating better office software and we get...

A reinvention of HTML Forms?

This is the 21st century! Where are my flying cars? I want flying cars, not "XML Form Things".

Re:Uh huh.

[Frostalicious]

InfoPath is a product which allows you to create XML documents which you can email to each other. These documents act like HTML forms when opened in the InfoPath environment. Users can then fill out the form and the data gets posted somewhere like to a webservice.

My opinion is that it is basically like a form on a web page, except less functional, and harder to develop. MS has taken the easiest part of web development (making forms out of INPUT tags) and made it much harder by wrapping a WYSIWYG editor around it. This is yet another attempt to allow the unwashed masses to design their own web forms for data manipulation. I think it is a massive failure so far since it only addresses the most trivial part of web development. And I'm no MS hater.

Call me a cynic, but..

[CdBee]

..would this ability (XML forms thru browser)be limited to Internet Explorer running on Longhorn?

Wake me up...

[thomas.me]

...when Microsoft stops talking about what they are going to reinvent next year, and releases something new .

Yawn. Never saw a more boring company.

marketing BS; "Office 2006, make YOU work faster!"

[SuperBanana]

I can see why some people might like having their icons change around, but I hate it. I want to click where the thing always is and have the thing work.

They do it, quite simply, because Office does pretty much what it always has. Sure, maybe Excel gets a new graph format or a new function, and maybe Word tells you how many paragraphs per fortnight you write.

None of these are sexy marketing bullets. "New in Office 2006! Sin() 125% faster! Slightly different 3D chart you'll never use! Spell check finally has 80% instead of 75% of English words!" doesn't cut it on the banners and magazine ads.

"Office 2006- streamlined for the way YOU and YOUR business works. So you can get to the important things in life quicker" (insert picture of model playing with model child, both of them laughing. Flowers and ice cream and little puppies optional).

Sound familiar? That's because that is the basis for virtually every "new" Office release marketing blitz in the last decade. Why? Because for much of the business world, if you're sitting there at your desk instead of home with your SO and/or kids, chances are you're staring at a Word, Excel, or Powerpoint document. Translation: you identify with the supposed problem and believe the utter lie- that the new software will boost your productivity.

Also, changing around the interface keeps the training companies busy, and pushes companies to upgrade everyone so "people don't get confused" (same with the myriad of niggling little incompatibilities, especially in Powerpoint, which affect how slides are rendered.)

A browser that can submit forms? FINALLY!

[Mr2001]

Thank God someone finally implemented this great idea. I'm so sick of having to telnet into servers and type in POST queries by hand to submit forms. Now, at long last, we'll be able to post comments on Slashdot just by typing text in a box and clicking a button!