Stand-alone data entry for Excel

[jds217]

I'm creating a simple Excel database for a small school library that just received a donation of a bunch of books. That part I know how to do.

We'd like to have a "data entry" party where we can get a bunch of people together, each on a different computer, each entering data on books so we can get the job done quickly. The computers aren't networked, so I'd have to go around afterwards, collect all the files, and merge them. That I can also do.

My problem is that only one computer HAS Excel on it, and it's not even in the library. Is there any way I can create a data-entry application that will save the data in a format I can later import to Excel?

Thanks!

John

[teylyn]

Hi,
if they don't have Excel, they might have Word, though. If not even that, they sure will have Wordpad, Notepad or any other text editor??

Set up a structure for a table header, delimited with the tab key and educate the user to enter the data for each book using the tab key between fields for each book

Something like
Author _TAB_ Title _TAB_ Publisher _TAB_ Year _TAB_ Category
Joe Bloggs _TAB_ Data Entry for Dummies _TAB_ The Book House _TAB_ 1984 _TAB_ Reference
Jane Doe _TAB_ How to Polish Your Nails _TAB_ Blonde Publishing _TAB_ 2002 _TAB_ Health & Beauty
... and so on


It is important that they hit the Tab key after each field and only hit the enter key when they have entered all fields for each book. If a data item is unknown, e.g. year, they need to hit the tab key twice, to make sure that the year field stays empty for that record, otherwise the Category (in my example) would be placed in the Year field.

Later, collect the files, copy them on the computer that has Excel, open them with Excel and set the Text to Columns to delimited, Tab as the delimiter. That should get the data in Excel.

Do you follow?

[jds217]

Yes, thank you! I'm sure they'd all have Word.

I'm still hoping to find something more spreadsheet-like, tabular, to reduce the possibility of errors. With the tab-delimited entry, if someone forgets to tab or tabs twice (or spaces instead of tabs), it might not be evident, but would mess up the data when it came time to import.

John

[teylyn]

John, if they all have Word, you can set up a real table in Word. This can easily be copied and pasted into Excel, and in Word you can format the table with grid lines, so it is clear to see where an entry needs to go or is left out

hth