True. I have always wanted to like the database and found myself unable to quite jump on board, despite the concussions I endured trying to make it work. That is why when Itamar came up with Dataform, I got pretty excited. I've been playing with it a LOT and testing pretty much all of its strengths and weaknesses in the past few months since about January. It has some big strengths in its favor:
1) It is much easier to set up a form in Dataform than it is in the database--and easier to understand the view options, though creating the fields is still kind of time-consuming.
2) It has the long-wished-for-ability for the instructor to pre-populate the activity with blank forms generated from the enrolled student roster that the students can just edit without having to be taught how to first add an entry and make it work.
3) It can be downloaded and saved in spreadsheet or html format (which can be converted to pdf) --and he is working the kinks out of the pdf download, afaik. Which also then means that the info one puts in the dataform isn't necessarily "stuck" in a Moodle mod forever if a teacher wants/needs it in a different format.
4) He has pre-set the table creation for forms in grid or tabular format (spreadsheet format) so that one doesn't have to know a whole lot about html to make it work. However, if branding does become important, the JS and CSS options are there for more advanced users.
But there are a couple of cons:
1) It is contributed, which means Itamar bears the burden of making his awesome creation work for all of us through each upgrade. It would be pretty great, I think, if core would take a hard look at some of the aspects of what makes his mod more user-friendly and maybe see if there is a way to make those features core in db and/or if the community could somehow end up with the best of both when all is said and done. Then I might be able to sell it better to the k-12 crowd that has been looking for a good way to create worksheets and forms in Moodle for nearly a decade. I've been toying with the idea of writing a review, if that would help people see what we have been looking for that dataform now delivers.
2) At the moment, since Itamar wrote it for up to 2.3, there are some things that break if you try to run it on 2.4. But the amazing thing to me is, most things still do work. (Thank you, Itamar!)
3) The table border bug that affects the HTML editor across Moodle, not just in the database or dataform mods, if one wants cells with borders, is still an issue, but thankfully someone in the community posted an HTML for dummies fix for table borders that I was able to use so that the forms I'm publishing have the comfortable, familiar borders. And hey, I've seen reviews by some designers about how borders are old-school. If you are a designer and are reading this, please don't chime in to lecture me on how no one uses table borders anymore in good design. We elementary and middle school teachers like our boxes. Let us have them if they make us feel at home for the first phase of our adventures in learning how to adapt to an online course environment.
Soooo...long story short, if you want to create a form that can be graded and can be connected to conditional/restricted access settings and anything else that you need from Moodle activities, you have the ability to try contributed modules on your site, and you are running 2.1-2.3, I recommend trying the Dataform tool package. You need to install both the block and the mod for best results even if you only end up using the mod at first.
I plan to include documentation in the review I want to write if I ever get around to writing it. I've been wanting to write it for weeks. But for now, you can see the docs here.
