Outlook Forms 11 - Data Verification

Issue:
Insure that all required fields have been filled out.

Quick:
Set validation formulas for fields on Validation tab of Properties page.

Visual/Learning:
The quick way to do this is to open the properties for a field, go to the Validation tab and select the check box "A value is required for this field"



The down side of doing it this way is that the error message you get is pretty vague. All I get for an error is that "A field on this form requires a value". So the poor person filling out the form has to guess which field on the form is missing required data.

A better way to do this is to use formulas to check my fields and assign error messages that are more friendly to work with. The formulas will change a bit depending on what kind of data I am checking.

To do this I need to know the name of the field I want to work with and what it is. I am going to work with the text field Payee so I right click on the field go to properties select the Value tab and I see that "Payee" is the name of the field value. Makes sense, so now I go to the Validation tab.

Here I check the box for "Validate this field before closing the form" and I put in the formula box "Asc(Payee)>0". All text is represented to the computer as a number code. The code comes from the American Standard Code for Information Interchange or ASCII for short. In the formula Asc is even a shorter version of ASCII. I look for the ASCII code for the text in the payee text box. As long as that box is not empty it should have an ASCII code of more then zero. That is why my formula tests to see if the ASCII code for the contents of the Payee field is greater then zero. Now the great thing is if it is not greater then zero I get to write my own error message. In this case I put "You must enter a name for the Payee". Now when someone tries to send this form with out filling in the Payee field they get a message that tells them exactly what needs to be fixed. This trick should work with pretty much any text field.

For radial buttons the same trick works because when I click on the button it assigns a text value to the field. First get the name of the field.

Check if the ASCII code for that field is greater then zero, and specify an error message.

The one thing of note here is that when you set validation on one radial button all the radial buttons in that group get the same setting, so you do not have to do it on each individual button.

The check amount is a number field and the default value gets set to zero. Because it does not make sense to request a check for zero dollars I will check that the value of CheckAmount is not equal to zero. <> in the formula means not equal.

That is pretty much all we need for this form because we are only checking for text and number fields in this form. But if you need to check a date field this is how I have done it in the past.

This formula is from a New Hire form I created. The default date field shows "none" when you run an Outlook form, but the computer really sees that as some date in the distant past. Now() is a function that gives me todays date. A formula like Now()<[StartDate] would check that the date entered was after today. So tomorrow, next week, or next year would be fine. A start date of today's date, yesterday or any older date would generate an error because today is not an earlier or smaller date then the start date.

In the case of the example below I am checking for Now() minus 10 days. In theory New Hire forms should be filled out before people start work, but in reality that is not always the case. This formula gave people a few days to get in the New Hire form after the employee starting working with no error, but it would still give an error if they forgot to put anything for a date.

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