Alan Richards was a
speaker at the European SharePoint Conference 2011.
Why not see if you can expand your knowledge from
reading Alan's insightful blog post!
If you have been to this blog before then you will know about
how much use I make of InfoPath 2010 and that one of the major uses
for where I work is our Academic Review day. Its a program of
interviews with students and their parents that happens twice a
year.
This year I was asked of it was possible to create a way that
the forms could be printed for certain students as the main input
form is not really printer friendly, as you can see below.
Creating A View
To achieve the desired outcome I started by creating a
different view, to do this open the original form in InfoPath 2010
and click on the Page Design tab on the ribbon
Click on the New View button and give the view a name
You will now have a blank form that
you can design to include the desired fields and layout that you
want for printing
Here is a screenshot of the same form as above but set out in a
different print friendly view
Printing View Options
Once you have designed your view you can setup how it
prints using the options. In Page Design view
(selected from the Ribbon) click on Properties
Here you can set the view to be read
only and if you want to use any background colours of images. On
the Print Settings tab you can select how the form will be printed;
portrait or landscape and if you want to include any header or
footer.
Switching Views
Once the view has been created your users will need to
select the view they want to print from, one of the ways of doing
this is to use the drop down box that appears at the top of the
main form when you open it.
Another option is to add a button to the main form which, when
clicked, will switch to the print view.
To add the button open the original form and at a convenient place
insert a button
Double click the button and select Rules as the action and enter a
label that is appropriate
Now click on the Rules button and for the actions of the rule
click Add and select Switch
Views
As shown above select your Print view and click
OK
Now when the user clicks the button the form will switch to the
print view and allow the user to print a nice printer friendly
view.
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