Offline forms

How can we convert Web forms for offline use, so people can download the forms, fill them out at their leisure (even saving partially completed forms and finishing later), and then finally submit them when they are completed and an Internet connection is available?

With Microsoft Office 2000 or later, have people download the forms and use Word for the data entry. Partially completed forms can be saved and submitted later at a user’s convenience.

For this to work, your HTML form must contain fully qualified URLs for the form action and any image or style sheet links on the page. With this approach, there is no protection for any of the content in the form page.

To take advantage of the form protection feature in Word, edit the original form in Word and choose the Protect Document for Forms setting in the Protect Document selection in the Tools menu. Providing offline versions of your forms as RTF or Word files through alternate links on your Web pages can help users keep things straight because these files will open in Word by default.

While specific to newer versions of Office, this technique can be useful for offline Web form completion and later submission.