So now that you have had a look at some of the formatting options associated with views, you are ready to look at some of the formatting techniques that haven’t been covered up to this point. Since the majority of the time that you will spend developing an InfoPath form will be spent working on the layout and formatting of both the form and the objects on the form itself, you should be able to pick up some tricks in the following sections to make your forms look like they were designed by a pro.
The task of adding borders and shading to a particular object has been saved for this chapter because the process of adding these formatting attributes is similar regardless of what type of object you are attempting to apply them to.
To add a border to an object (Text Box, Table, and so on), right-click the object and select Borders and Shading from the right-click menu. This opens the dialog box shown in Figure 8-5.
Figure 8-5: Borders and Shading dialog box options
With an interface similar to the Borders dialog box in Microsoft Word, you can select the style, color, and width of the border to be applied by using the drop- down lists on the left side of the dialog box. On the right side of the dialog box are a number of preset border styles and a graphic that shows you the effect of your border selection on the object that you have selected. You can click the icons around this graphic to apply a border to the top, bottom, left, and right of your object and the display will show you how the object will look when finished.
To add shading to an object, click the Shading tab, shown in Figure 8-6.
Figure 8-6: Shading options
By default, each object is set to No Color, but you can select a color from the Color drop-down list. If the color that you want to apply is not in the list, you can use the More Colors option to open the standard Windows color picker, where you can select from a spectrum of colors or enter your own RGB values to create a custom color.
If you are a bit leery of selecting colors that clash, there is no need to be. In addition to the format tools that you have looked at so far, InfoPath has some predefined color schemes that can add a bit of pizzazz to your forms. To apply a color scheme to your form, select View | Design Tasks (just to open the Task Pane) and then use the drop-down list at the top of the Task Pane to select the option for Color Schemes. This opens the dialog box shown in the following illustration and allows you to select a color scheme for your form.
As you add different objects to your form, these colors will be applied. For example, if you select the Blueberry color scheme and then add a Table with Title layout table, your form might look something like the one shown in Figure 8-7.
Figure 8-7: A color scheme applied
Tip | To answer that frequently asked question: No, you can’t change any of the colors in a scheme or create your own. |