Creating Tabbed Views in InfoPath 2007

This comes from: InfoPath Team Blog

InfoPath doesn't have a built-in Tab Control, but it's easy enough to build one using tables, buttons, and views, so let's do it!

The basic idea

Here's what to build:

• Views for the contents of each tab
• Table with shading to give the visual effect of tabs
• Buttons for each tab with a rule that switches the view

For example:

Then when the user clicks "Details" they switch views to see this:

How To, with tricks along the way

1. Create all of your views (from the Views task pane)
   • Select the same color scheme for each view (use the Color Schemes task pane)
   • Use Background Color on the Format menu to make the background of each view the second color for the current color scheme (the second-darkest color at the top of the color picker)
2. Insert a layout table (on the Insert menu, click Table)
   • Make it two rows high. The first row will be for the buttons, the second will be for the tab content.
   • Split the first row to make a cell for each view, plus one extra cell to take the remaining horizontal space.
3. Insert a button into each cell (from the Controls task pane)
   • Add a rule to each button to switch to the corresponding view. Do this even for the current view's button.
   • Make the current "active" button Bold, so it stands out.
4. Use borders and shading (on the Format menu)
   • Select all the buttons at once (hold down the Control key and click each one), then remove all borders and shading from the buttons (they're invisible except for their label!).
   • Select the entire table, then add borders inside and out using the first color in the color scheme (the darkest color).
   • Select the non-active cells and set their shading to the third lightest color of the color scheme.
   • Select the active cell and the content cell, and set their shading to white.
   • Select the active cell and remove the bottom border so it becomes connected to the content cell.
   • Select the right-most "extra" cell and remove the top and right border
5. Copy the table to each view
   • Update the borders and shading to change the "active" cell for each view
   • Put all your fields for each tab in its content cell

Getting fancy

If the tabs above aren't pretty enough for your form, add some images inside a few more table cells around each button to provide rounded corners and other visual effects. It's more work, and requires some image editing, but with a little elbow grease you could get something as schmancy as this: