Copying a View Layout

You might find that particular visual components of InfoPath views are used again and again. For example, you might want to use a standard header for many forms ”perhaps you created a Table with Title layout table, added a logo, and customized the text and background to a defined corporate design.

To re-use a custom visual component, select it in the view in which it was created, and copy it to a blank view in a form template that's used to store such reusable visual components. When you paste the Table with Title layout table into the new blank view, all the customizations will be applied, too.

Copying views can also be useful when you need to modify, for example, an InfoPath form template's data source. Create your new form template using the Data Source Setup Wizard, which you saw in Chapter 1. On the old view you want to preserve, you can use Ctrl+A to copy everything in the view, and then use Ctrl+V to paste the old view into a blank new view in the new form template. Right-click on form controls, select Change Binding, and make appropriate selections from the available components of the data source.

Now let's move on to look at how to apply color styling in InfoPath views.