The Outlook Forms Designer has a lot of tools to help you lay out your custom forms exactly the way you like them.
The first tool is the basic dot grid, which it uses to overlay your form. Your controls on the form will, by default, snap to the nearest grid dot—helping to ensure that they line up consistently. You can adjust the size of the grid (i.e., the spacing between the dots) by going to Form | Set Grid Size in the Forms Designer. If you don't want the controls to snap to a grid dot, select Layout | Snap to Grid to disable that feature. You can also turn the grid off entirely in the Layout Menu by clicking the "Show Grid" menu item.
To match up two controls on the form you can eyeball it and hope for the best, or make use of some of the layout tools. Select the first control, then hold down the Ctrl key and select the rest. One of the controls will have white handles and the rest will have black—the one with the white handles is the "master control" that to which the other ones conform. Now click Layout | Align to force the selected controls to line up with each other on the top, bottom, center, or left or right edges; or click Layout | Make Same Size to set the controls to be the same height, width, or both.
Outlook forms can have multiple pages. When you open a form in the Forms Designer you will see several tabs appear with names like "(p.2)," "(p.3)," and so forth. A page whose name is in parentheses is a hidden page—the user won't see it. To unhide that page, select it and then click "Form | Display this Page." Most of those pages are going to be blank initially—you can add any controls you like to them, then unhide them to give your users more functionality.
In many cases, the default forms, like the Contact form, suits your purpose pretty well—and you'd like to have just a half dozen additional fields to choose from, perhaps some custom fields as well. Open the Contact form in the Forms Designer, select one of the hidden blank pages, add your new controls and custom fields to that page, unhide the page, then publish that form (you'll have to give it a new name), and use that to create new items in the Contacts folder.
Voilà! You've just added some functionality to the application for your users.
Adding Controls to Your Form
To add new controls to your form, use the Control Toolbox and the Field chooser. To launch the Control Toolbox, select Form | Control Toolbox. The Control Toolbox has 15 basic controls that you can add to an Outlook form.
Add a Label control to place text in your form. Add a TextBox control, which you can bind to an Outlook field, as a way to display, add, or edit the values of that field. You can add ComboBox or ListBox controls that allow your users to select from a predefined list of values for the field. ComboBoxes also allow a user to type in their own value if none of the predefined ones are appropriate; ListBoxes give you the security of forcing the user to select from a predefined value without the discretion to type in their own.
You can populate Combo or List boxes at design-time with specific values, or you can do it programmatically at run time so that when the user opens the form, the script will fill in the possible values from items in another folder—such as names from the Contacts folder, for example.
You can add a Command Button that will run Visual Basic Script code that you specify. To add the code for the button simply double-click it in the Forms Designer and the Code editor will open, ready to accept your code. Control buttons can also be bound to fields—a Control Button bound to the "TO" field, for example, will launch the address book in the familiar chooser mode that allows you to add names from the address books to the TO, CC, or BCC fields—just as you're used to seeing when you click the TO or CC button on a Comp
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Last Modified: 2/16/2007 6:02:00 PM
