I don't know if anyone here has a job that involves heavy data entry. I hope to get some opinions, or suggestions to something new.
My company has a private database which stores various kind of data - from product specifications, inventory ins-and-outs to customers' contacts. We have a web based application which allows our staff to enter data using various kinds of forms.
The thing is, many colleagues always complain about the tedious work for manually entering the data via the forms. They find the process time-consuming and tiring.
They asked/suggested if they could just enter all the data on a spreadsheet and dumped the spreadsheet file into the web application so that the data will be imported just like it is entered via the forms. They said that they find entering data via spreadsheets is a much more friendly and convenient method as compared to traditional forms.
I am not sure about that but I have read many articles on the web saying how great it is for having data forms over spreadsheet-style data entry. May be they find all the field-clicking/tab-pressing tiring when using a form? As you know when entering data in a form, ones need to move from one field to another along the form. And also, with spreadsheets, ones can copy-and-paste the data from previous row to a new row and modify the necessary differences.
If we were going to switch to spreadsheet data entry method, my boss would not be very happy as my boss has invested so much on building all these tailor-made software which all allows(requires) form data entry. In that sense, we would have probably been better off sticking with MS Excel/spreadsheet software at the very beginning.
I want to know what you think about spreadsheet data entry vs form data entry too. Apart from these two methods, would there be any other means of data entry? Are there software for these other methods? Thank you
P.S. Please don't suggest OCR software. I personally don't believe in its accuracy.