Dmitriy Syechin, 123RF
Data acquisition with shell tools
Wheat and Chaff
Companies that need to enter large volumes of data manually often take on temporary staff and allow little time to train their new recruits. Additionally, standard programs such as spreadsheets can be hard to understand and thus might not be an option for data entry.
At this point, companies might turn to the IT department for a more intuitive approach. Data entry scripts that prompt the data entry staff in a very simple way can sometimes provide a solution.
Terminal programs exist for any operating system, and they can support access via dialup connections, encrypted Internet connections, internal networks, or even the serial port.
Masks for data entry programs also are easily coded and modified, thus removing the need for complex provisioning at the desktop. In the simplest of cases, the data entry script will be based directly on the structure of the data you need to enter.
Ergonomics and Tools
Mask-oriented data entry scripts (Figure 1) query the user for the fields in the order in which they appear on printed forms (Figure 2).
Figure 1: Mask-oriented data entry script based on the form shown in Figure 2.
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