Chapter 4: Customized Forms

Overview

You are already familiar with the capabilities of Microsoft Outlook forms because every item you view or use in Outlook is based on one. By customizing these forms, you can enhance the way you distribute and collect information electronically both inside and outside your organization.

Outlook allows you to build custom forms based on default Outlook items. When you customize built-in forms, your application inherits default capabilities. You can extend the functionality of these forms using custom controls and Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript). We'll look at VBScript in more detail in Chapter 5.

Outlook also allows you to base your forms on Microsoft Office documents, which prevents you from having to re-create existing functionality. For example, if you are building an expense reporting application, you can base your Outlook expense reporting form on a Microsoft Excel document, giving you the full power of Excel inside your application. You can then further extend your application using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) inside the Excel document. You can also use custom Excel properties inside your Outlook views to sort and group items.