Whether on paper or electronic, forms are the dominant form of business transaction record where humans are involved. That's because a well-designed form provides the guidance and constraints that help you get the data entry right.
guidance
A form guides you by providing a separate space for each piece of information, with the appropriate granularity (e.g. one address field, or separate fields for street, city, and state).
constraints
A form can constrain the length of each field (perhaps with a box for each character), or limit data values to items checked off from a printed list.
But these strengths of traditional forms – guided entry and constrained data values – can be weaknesses as well. InfoPath improves on conventional forms software in several ways:
InfoPath guides data entry based on a schema of the form designer's choosing. It will even help you create a schema.
InfoPath enforces the constraints of the schema, plus additional constraints that the form designer can specify.
The user is actually creating an abstract XML document while completing the form, although he only sees the rendered form view. The experience is similar to other Office products.
The user can add and delete repeating elements, or even groups of repeating elements. The form view expands and contracts as needed.
There can be multiple form views for a single document type. The layout of the fields in the form views does not have to follow the order in the underlying XML document.
The form can have XHTML rich text elements, with lists, highlighted phrases, etc.
