Create a Form

FrontPage 2002/2003

FrontPage has some nice form tools that make it a snap to put a form on your web site. FrontPage allows you to create a form that sends you the information in an email, or stores the information in a .csv file on your site that you can open in Excel. For more advanced forms, you can also use FrontPage to specify a database in which to store your information (this is not covered in this tutorial). To use FrontPage's form tools, your web site will eventually need to be published on a site that has FrontPage extensions.

This tutorial shows you how to create a simple "Comments" form.

1. In FrontPage, open the page where you want to insert a form. Put your cursor in the area that you want the form to be.
    
2. Go to Insert > Form > Form.
   
   
    
3. In the normal page view, you will see a Submit button and a Reset button, inside an area outlined by a dotted line. This dotted line is the area that the form covers.
   
   
    
4. Place your cursor before the Submit button. You will now probably want to insert a table so that you have a neatly-laid-out form. Go to Table > Insert > Table and insert a table with 4 rows and 2 columns with a cellpadding of 2. Uncheck the width.
   
   Your page will now look like:
   
   
   
    
5. Type in text that will describe your form fields:
   
   
    
6. Now, place your cursor in the cell that will hold the first form field. Go to Insert > Form > Textbox.
   
   Your page will now look like:
   
   
    
7. Do the same for the Email text box:
   
   
    
8. For the comments area, go to Insert > Form > Text Area.
   
   Your page will now look like:
   
   
    
9. You may resize the comments area by clicking on the field and dragging the sides.
   
   
    
10. Format the text, table cells, and form fields in any other ways that you want. Now, you are ready to configure the form properties. First, right-click on each field and choose Form Field Properties (or click on a field and hit Alt-Enter).
    
    
     
11. The Form Field dialog box will pop up. The "Name" is the form field's identifier. Type in a descriptive name, such as "Name" or "CustomerName." Avoid having spaces or special characters. Do the same for the "email" field and the "comments" field as well as the "Submit" and "Reset" buttons. For this example, we have named the fields "CustomerName," "CustomerEmail," "CustomerComments," "Submit," and "Reset."
    
    
     
12. Now, right-click anywhere in the form and choose "Form Properties."
    
    
     
13. The Form Properties dialog box will appear.
    
    
    
    The default "send to" sends your information to a file in your _private folder. This file can be opened in Excel or another text editor.
    
    If you also want the form to send information to an email address, you may type in an email address in the field.
     
14. Now, click on the "Options" button, and click on the "Saved Information" tab.
    
    
     
15. This will show the form fields that will be saved. We usually delete the "Submit" field:
    
    
     
16. Your last step is to publish your web site to a server that has FrontPage extensions, then test out your form! You can type in "http://yoururl.com/_private/form_results.csv" to download your form results.

Related Links

• Form
• Form Fields
• Insert Form