Hello everyone,
As part of my work, I receive incident reports and forms which I then compile into excel for quick trending.
I'm currently hoping to automate this process a bit, and would like to tap into your vast knowledge & experience for guidance.
The forms can be filled in any way, whether it's hand written, word, excel, web.
The form(s) may include drop down menus and selections. For example, an injury report form includes the type of injury, the body part injured, experience of person etc.
Now, I was considering the following options for automating the form completion / data capture process:
- Have reports completed on excel forms, which I can then import into a master excel sheet for analysis. This can work, but excel doesn't have multi-select lists, which I need! There are macros to enable multi-select lists, but I'd rather not macro such a basic functionality. Also, I still have to ensure the master sheet will open all excel files and import the data.
- Sharepoint. We have access to sharepoint 2007 (2010 soon!), and I'm looking at ways to automate reporting and data capturing using sharepoint, but not sure what's the best path for that yet. Any of you used that before? It'll require authenticating users etc.
- Adobe FormsCentral. Never tried it my self, but it looks cool. Seems that the forms are Adobe-PDF based forms, which means the forms can easily be printed too! And it has auto-trending built in. Anyone tried this?
- Others. What other form/data collection methods do you recommend? Is there anything that'll work well/easily with R (since I intend to start using R more often if I can).
Thank you!
As part of my work, I receive incident reports and forms which I then compile into excel for quick trending.
I'm currently hoping to automate this process a bit, and would like to tap into your vast knowledge & experience for guidance.
The forms can be filled in any way, whether it's hand written, word, excel, web.
The form(s) may include drop down menus and selections. For example, an injury report form includes the type of injury, the body part injured, experience of person etc.
Now, I was considering the following options for automating the form completion / data capture process:
- Have reports completed on excel forms, which I can then import into a master excel sheet for analysis. This can work, but excel doesn't have multi-select lists, which I need! There are macros to enable multi-select lists, but I'd rather not macro such a basic functionality. Also, I still have to ensure the master sheet will open all excel files and import the data.
- Sharepoint. We have access to sharepoint 2007 (2010 soon!), and I'm looking at ways to automate reporting and data capturing using sharepoint, but not sure what's the best path for that yet. Any of you used that before? It'll require authenticating users etc.
- Adobe FormsCentral. Never tried it my self, but it looks cool. Seems that the forms are Adobe-PDF based forms, which means the forms can easily be printed too! And it has auto-trending built in. Anyone tried this?
- Others. What other form/data collection methods do you recommend? Is there anything that'll work well/easily with R (since I intend to start using R more often if I can).
Thank you!