Customer Reviews

How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 (How to Do Everything)

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I have found nothing in this book that isn't available for free online or in downloads from Microsoft. I wonder why so many computer book authors feel that a re-editing and repackaging of free, widely available product usage advice provides ample reason to ask a customer to shell out money? It's a false promise. Even the "how to do everything" angle is frankly no more than a re-presentation of applications that Microsoft describes just as well for free (and with code) online.

Do buy this book if you've never heard of XML and you don't really want to know what it is or what it does.
Don't buy this book if you want to know how repeating sections differ from repeating tables, or if you want to understand all the data validation options.
Although this book does offer some simplified explanations of what Infopath does, it is as light on useful examples as it is heavy on screendumps. Simply repeating what's displayed on the screen is not terribly enlightening, and it's even worse when the text and the screendumps are continually 2 or 3 pages apart.
Shocking spelling and simple grammatical errors detract from the little genuinely useful information presented, and make the whole book's pace seem rushed and incomplete.
If you don't really like Microsoft, but you have to learn Infopath, find another book!

I started working through this book with high hopes but soon got very frustrated. Although the author probably does get through almost everything you can do with InfoPath, you have to do a lot of pushing and shoving to figure out how to do it. The author assumes that you have a project you will be working on with accompanying database or Web service, so you can follow along. The downloadable files included a couple of xml files, but no database. There were no specific instructions for finding a usable webservice to try things out.

Most of the book explains things that any slighty advanced user of Office applications could figure out on their own. I am not sure the author really knows who he is writing for. Since he explains all about XML in a single chapter, he must assume the user is new to that, but somehow also knows all about web services. A book like this has to aim at fairly elementary level, with actual examples to work through, rather than "you can" do this or that.

I have definitely learned a few things reading the book, but mostly through figuring them out on my own.

As an Excel power user now forced to use Infopath for internal forms, this book was helpful. Definitely pitched at office users as opposed to developers, but still a solid reference.

The book is very objetive and task oriented. A powerful first approach to master teh Microsoft Office Infopath 2003. It makes easy to create, publish and analyse form data collected, and helps to take full advantage of InfoPath's key features.