Working with Form Results in Your FrontPage 2000-Based Web 

When visitors to your FrontPage-based web fill out a form, FrontPage® stores the results according to your specification. The visitor's input may be:

• Sent to you as an e-mail message.
• Stored as plain text in a text file in your web.
• Stored as formatted HTML on a page in your web.
• Stored in a database in your web.

If you choose to send the form results to a text file or HTML page, you specify a .txt or .htm file to store the form results. FrontPage adds to this file every time a site visitor fills out the form. You can use this file in many ways. For example, you can make it visible in your web by linking to it from another page, you can keep it hidden from site visitors and use it for your own reference, or you can use Microsoft Excel to view the information in the file.

Deciding Whether to Use Text or HTML

Whether to use text or HTML for your results file depends on how you want to use the file. Do you want to read it easily, or link to it so that site visitors can see it? Use HTML. Do you want to view the file easily in a spreadsheet? Use text. You can even specify both, and FrontPage will save the results to both a text file (for easy viewing in a spreadsheet) and an HTML file (for easy viewing as a Web page).

Generally, saving to a text file is faster than saving to an HTML file. When you choose either text or HTML, you can further specify how the text or HTML is formatted in the file.

To set the format of a text or HTML file

1. In Page view, open a page that contains a form.
2. Right-click on the form, and then click Form Properties on the shortcut menu.
3. In the Form Properties dialog box, click Options, and then click the File Results tab.
   In the File name box, you can tell whether the file is text or HTML by the file extension: .txt is a text file, and .htm is an HTML file.
4. If you want to change the file to text or to HTML, change the file extension to .txt or to .htm in the File name box.
5. In the File format list, select a format.

If you are saving form results to a text file (.txt), use one of these formats:

• Text database using comma, tab, or space as a separator These formats are easy to view in a spreadsheet, but the text file is difficult to read.
• Formatted text Text is formatted into columns that are easier to read than the text database formats, but this text is not practical for viewing in a spreadsheet.
• Text formatted within HTML This format saves quickly, yet is easy to convert to a Web page (by changing the file extension to .htm).

If you are saving form results to a Web page (.htm), use one of these formats:

• HTML This format presents a list of fields with the field name in boldface, and a colon separates the field name from the data.
• HTML definition list Data for each field is indented under the field name.
• HTML bullet list This format is like HTML format, except that each field is bulleted.

Sending Form Results to a File

You can name a file to store the results of a form by editing the form properties. If you are using the Form Page Wizard, you can name the results file in the Output Options pane of the wizard.

If you use the Form Page Wizard to create more than one form page in your web, be sure to enter a unique name for the results file every time. Otherwise, results from all the forms are stored in the same file (Formrslt.txt or Formrslt.htm, by default). By default, each new post is appended to the end of the file.

If you want to, you can create new results files for existing forms.

To specify a results file for an existing form

1. In Page view, open a page that contains a form.
2. Right-click on the form, and then click Form Properties on the shortcut menu.
   A file name, an e-mail address, or both are displayed in the boxes under the Send to option, unless the form is a custom form or a database form.
3. Click Options, and then click the File Results tab.
4. In the File name box, enter a name with a .txt extension for a text file or an .htm extension for a Web page.
5. In the File format list, select the format you want.
6. Select other options as desired; specify a second file in another format if you want.
7. On the Saved fields tab, in the Form fields to save box, delete any fields that you don't want to appear in the results file (If you make a mistake, click Save All and start over). You can also specify date and time formats and other information to save.
8. When you're finished, click OK to close the dialog box, and click OK again to close the Form Properties dialog box.

What You Can Do with Results Files

If you want to share forms results with site visitors, you can save the results to a Web page and then create a hyperlink to the page. This is how the Guestbook template in FrontPage works: the results file, Guestlog.htm, is included on the page where the guestbook form appears, using the Include Page component.

If you do not want site visitors to see forms results, store results files in the _private folder. Contents of the _private folder are hidden from site visitors. Even if you don't have a hyperlink to a results file, you should store the file in the _private folder to be sure that site visitors don't see it. Otherwise, if you use default names that FrontPage creates, anyone familiar with the FrontPage naming scheme can view results files by typing the URL for the file in their browser.

FrontPage has database features that enable you to save form results directly to an existing database (or FrontPage can create a Microsoft Access database to store the results). However, you may prefer to simply save the results to a text file that you can view in a spreadsheet. A great advantage of saving form results in a text file is that text data is quick to save and easy to import into a spreadsheet

If you're planning to view form results in a spreadsheet, use a text file to save the form results. For the format of the text file, select one of the text database formats and then specify a comma, tab, or space as a separator.

To view form results in Excel

1. In Microsoft Excel, click File, and then click Open.
2. Click Web Folders, and open the web where your results file is stored. (Remember to go to the _private folder if that's where your text file is stored.)
3. In the Files of type box, select Text Files, and then double-click the results file in the file list.
   Excel starts the Text Import Wizard.
4. In step 1 of the Text Import Wizard, select the Delimited option.
5. In step 2 of the Text Import Wizard, select the separator for your data: Comma, Space, or Tab.
6. Follow instructions in the wizard, and then click Finish.