Copying a field from one Infopath form to another

Question

So I have like 10 drop-down menus of manually entered values. These same values need to be on three different forms, and I'd like to not have to type it all three times.

I tried going onto the field, right-clicking, copying, and pasting to Form 2 with "Keep Source Formatting," as described in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-G2quDy3L8

This does not work for me. It just copies an empty field to my new form.Re-binding does nothing.

I tried "Select All" and pasting everything into a new form. I tried using both "Keep Source Formatting" and "Merge Formatting." Nothing. Just empty fields.

Any guesses why that would be? Or even better, anyone know how I can copy my manually entered list from one form to another? Infopath 2010, Sharepoint on Office 365.

Answer 1

To be honest the first thing I would try to do is move away from InfoPath. Look at Access, Excel, or custom ASPX forms.

If you want to stay with InfoPath move your manual data into a list. You can then use that list as a secondary data source for lookups and use it across multiple forms.

Addressing your specific copy section - you can copy the field directly but not the data source between forms. The o ky way to do this is to crack open the XSN file and copy the data XML into another form.