Microsoft InfoPath

Microsoft InfoPath is a discontinued software application for designing, distributing, filling and submitting electronic forms containing structured data. Microsoft initially released InfoPath as part of the Microsoft Office 2003 family. The product features a WYSIWYG form designer in which the various controls (e.g. text box, radio button, checkbox) are bound to data, represented separately as a hierarchical tree view of folders and data fields. InfoPath 2013 became available for the first time as a freestanding download on September 1, 2015, when Microsoft made it available in its Download Center. However, unlike previous versions of InfoPath, the standalone version of InfoPath 2013 requires an active ProPlus subscription to Office 365. The current version of InfoPath 2013 (15.0.4733.1000) is designed to be an optional component to the Office suite of applications for users that need it. Its indirect successor is Microsoft Forms, which is free to anyone with a Microsoft Account. In order to use InfoPath to fill in a form, a designer must develop an InfoPath template first. According to Jean Paoli and John Godel, two of its developers, a key architectural design decision was "to adhere to the XML paradigm of separating the data in a document from the formatting." A patent filed in 2000 by Adriana Neagu and Jean Paoli describes the technology as "authoring XML using DHTML views and XSLT."