About Forms

Forms provide better organization of information by presenting it to the user in a custom way. For example, a purchase order form may contain a drop-down list box for selecting a product and a few buttons. User interaction with a form is dynamic. For example, pressing a button on a form should normally invoke some action (such as placing a purchase order). Also, forms may change their look in response to user actions.

Forms may be sent as messages. Thus, the recipient will see the same form view as the sender.

Two standards are currently in wide use and competing: MAPI forms and HTML forms. MAPI forms are difficult to program (as pretty much everything with MAPI). However, once created and properly installed they may provide nice functionality (as Outlook demonstrates).

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