Best Way to Make Forms in Office

I get this question a lot. What's the best way to make a form to fill out?

I have several different answers to this question, each with their own relative merits and drawbacks. The guiding question is always, "What do you want to do with the form when the person is done filling it out?"

1. Create the form in Word. If you want to go this route, there are two tools that will serve you well - the Forms toolbar, and tables. Put the label for the data (like the word "name" or the word "address" in the left column of the row, and the form field where you want the person to put the name, or address, or phone number, in the right column of the row.
   
   Use this method if you want to create a quick and dirty form that will be printed out and mailed to you, or emailed to you.
   
   Don't use this method if you're concerned about maximum number of characters in a field, and/or you're worried about populating this information into a central data location later.
2. Create the form in Excel. If you want to go this route, the two tools you'll find most useful are validation and protection. Use Data->Validation to restrict what kind of values a person can put into a cell, like minimum and maximum numeric values, and in-cell drop-down lists, using Data->Validation, with the "allow" property being set to "list."
   
   Use this method if your primary concern is getting valid data within a given threshold. Compared to Word, still pretty quick and dirty, and still perfectly serviceable for printout and/or email.
   
   Don't use this method if you have to populate the data into a central data location later. You can do it, but it's clunky and inelegant. But better than Word in this regard.
3. Create an Access database. This will require first creating the table(s) to hold the data, then the forms to enter the data. Probably, you'll want to implement some kind of security, so that your form users don't see your back-end functionality.
   
   Use this method if you're only dealing with internal clients (people in your office, or people who work for your company in other locations who can access the same server(s) you can.) This method is the best of the Office programs for validating data to ensure its compliance with your standards, and has the best built-in method for making sure that required data gets filled in.
   
   Don't use this method if you have to make your form available to people outside your company.

Other solutions to the problem that I've heard batted around, going outside the traditional confines of Office, also come with ad and disadvantages:

1. InfoPath. This is a new product for Office 2003. It is a very elegant, easy-to-use forms designer.
   
   Use this method if you have a SharePoint website for your company where people can go and fill out your form on the team and/or company SharePoint site. You can also use this method if you already have an Access database created, and you want to make the InfoPath form talk to the Access database.
   
   Don't use this method if you have to publish your form to external parties; their likelihood of having the tools needed is pretty low.
2. Acrobat forms. Acrobat 6 and 7 both have pretty robust, usable tools to create radio buttons, check boxes, and drop-down menus. If you know your way around Acrobat JavaScript, you can extend the functionality of the forms quite a bit. With 7, there's a separate Form Designer product (comes with the Professional version of Acrobat, I believe) that makes form design a pretty painless process.
   
   Use this method if you have to publish your form for use by the broader general public, and you want to give that general public the chance to fill in the data in a form. You can then either have them postal mail it to you, or submit it to a database.
   
   Don't use this method unless you have a respectable knowledge of Acrobat and of basic web design; the way to make certain functionality work in Acrobat forms requires a little of each.
3. Web forms. You can put a form on a website that a person can fill out, right there on your website, and have that form data go to a database, get emailed to you, or any combination thereof.
   
   Use this method to make your form most widely available to the general public. This method requires you either are or know someone who can do both web programming and database design. This method is very effective at allowing you to aggregate data into a database. To make it work, it requires that you have a web site that can support a web language, like ASP, PHP, JSP, CGI, or ColdFusion. (There are many others; those are just the first few I can think of.)
   
   Don't use this method if you don't need to aggregate your data into a database; it's kind of overkill, and comes with a certain human-hour cost. Don't use this method if you don't have access to competent web design, programming, and database design resources, or don't have the time to learn them.

Personally, given my choice, I'll usually use a web form that uses ColdFusion to talk to a database, and fill that database with the form values. Then, again, using ColdFusion, I can write code to email me a notification that a new form submission has occurred, and the person who submitted it can get a "thank you" email. I say ColdFusion because that's what I was trained in, not necessarily because it's better than ASP, PHP, JSP, or CGI.

More than anything, look to see what others have done, including cases of what you do and don't like. Hopefully, that'll help guide your process better.