Eli Robillard asks Where did forms go in Word 12? and I want to paste in my comment to his post regarding additional InfoPath form technology integrated into Word 2007:

Hi - Eric Richards from the InfoPath dev team here. I'm not answering your question off hand - there's lots of UI that's been moved around. Be sure that you have your "Developer" tab turned on first for the options of the application where you're trying to do something whizzy. More complicated UI has been turned off by default.

And as for forms and InfoPath - note that there's a new feature called... oh, what's the official name, Document Information Panel? When you view the properties for a document, you're seeing an embedded, autogenerated InfoPath form.

This gets more interesting when you go and open the Office 2007 document from SharePoint. You can see the SharePoint properties in this InfoPath form, too.

Now the fun part: you can customize this form to add rules, calculations, validation, etc, etc (or just make it look snazzy).

For the new Office format, we also provide a feature where you can add a customized InfoPath form into the document (running against XML content in the docx file).

One cool thing for advanced Word devs out there: both Word and InfoPath can run against the same XML in the docx at the same time, meaning that you can easily drop SharePoint properties into your Word doc and see both InfoPath and Word handling changes in either place. So, you can have structured information with all sorts of easy to write declarative validation and calculations in the InfoPath form and just drop it into Word and have everything continue working.

This way, you can focus on your structured, validated data in the InfoPath portion of your document and the more free flowing unstructured info in your traditional Word canvas.

Note that PowerPoint and Excel also have the new InfoPath Document Information Properties but it is not nearly as integrated as Word.

Cheers,

== Eric