best way to computerize a 20 page questionnaire 2

[teering]

what would be the best way to
computerize a 20 page questionnaire with ability to export/import answers for each
consumer (life of form would be one year, approximately 1,000 or more consumers)
and then a revised/new form has to be created

types of questionnaire answers to capture are: yes/no, select all that apply, narrative response

I need to be able to link the template document to visual foxpro consumer database for entering
and saving information and then subsequent viewing/printing on demand

i have researched the adobe pro x - but it has a license limit of 500 uses of a form

i am an experienced visual foxpro 9 programmer with relational database systems.

any advice on how to approach this project would be greatly appreciated.


Teresa Pickering
Professional Computer Services

 

[Mike Lewis]

Teresa,

Can you provide more information.

Does the consumer fill in the questionnaire on paper or on the screen? If paper, do you envisage using data-entry clerks to enter it into a computer? Or some sort of OCR?

If the consumer is filling it on the screen, are you able to install software on their computers? Or will it be done via a website and browser?

Most important, what is the end product? You say you want to link the questionnaire to a consumer database, but what do you want to get out of it? Reports? Spreadsheets? What?

My own approach would be to do the whole thing in one or more Visual FoxPro forms, but that's based only on the little I know about your requirements.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips, training, consultancy

 

[JRB-Bldr]

I am going to make some assumptions here since some of the detail is not mentioned.

With 1000+ 'consumers' filling in data, I am guessing that you want those 'consumers' to fill in this questionaire on the web and then you want to get the data back to a VFP application in some manner.

If so then you need to develop your Web application in whatever method you are comfortable with and/or you want.
The post-data-entry portion of your Web application will then process the data back to a SQL Server database.

Finally have your VFP application acquire the data from that same SQL Server database to run whatever is needed.

Good Luck,
JRB-Bldr

 

[JRB-Bldr]

Mike and I were on the same 'page'.

We cannot give you good, substantive feedback when too many variables are not defined.
Doing so based on guesses is typically not much benefit.

Good Luck,
JRB-Bldr

 

[teering]

thank you, hope this explains more:
it will only be on a network environment for in house only

data entry persons will enter the answers from paper source doc

example: they select 'John Doe' from the consumer table, click on a link that takes them to the questionnaire template, they enter the answers, then save only the answers into maybe
a linked table or (text file saved to a general field)


the questionnaire is typed in ms office





Teresa Pickering
Professional Computer Services

 

[Dan Freeman]

If the document already exists in a Word (or Excel) document, make sure it was created as a template with honest-to-goodness form fields. New documents created from a template containing form fields become a fill-in form, and answers are saved with the document.

You could easily create each new document using automation from VFP, and once the user indicates they have finished filling in the document you can read the contents of the form fields using automation, putting the data wherever it is that data should go.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Teresa,

Thanks for the clarification. Based on that, I would suggest you develop a simple VFP app that captures the inputs from the data-entry people, and stores it in a FoxPro table.

If you want to analyse the results is some way, or use them to generate a report, the table would need a field for each answer - not a General field, as you suggest.

If you only want somewhere to store the answers, then a memo field might be a better bet.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips, training, consultancy

 

[MrDataGuy]

Thinking a little outside of the box. If the information could be entered by the survey takers via the web, look at this tool (not a VFP solution.)

http://www.surveymonkey.com/

Lion Crest Software Services
Anthony L. Testi
President

http://www.LionCrestSoftwareServices.com

 

[JRB-Bldr]

"they select 'John Doe' from the consumer table, click on a link that takes them to the questionnaire template"

There is no reason to use some "Template" from another language such as Word, Adobe, etc. What would be the point of that if you wanted the data to end up in VFP data tables?

Like Mike & Dan above, I'd recommend that you have the data entry people enter the printed answers directly into a VFP application form.

While I don't typically recommend using Grids for data entry, due to the number of questions/answers described ("20 page questionnaire"), it might just be OK for quick data entry.
One possible approach might be to have a single Form with a data entry Grid on it using a temporary cursor and just have your data entry people scroll down through the Grid entering the data as they go. When done they then click on a Submit button (or something) to 'push' the data to the 'real' backend and clear the Grid cursor for the next entry.

On the 'different note' like I first suggested - if you wanted to eliminate all of the data transcription (and the man-hour expense to do so), you could do the project as a Web application (see my posting above) and then have the VFP analysis/reporting application just pick up the data and process it.

A third, more-convoluted possibility could possibly be, depending on the type of data and how 'standardized' the answers might be, would be to SCAN the questionaires into files. Those files would then need to be converted (using OCR??) into text files which VFP could then parse. If there were a LOT of questionaries now and MORE in the future, as you suggest, it might be worth looking into how this might be accomplished.

Good Luck,
JRB-Bldr

 

[Dan Freeman]

Please note that I **DID NOT** suggest using a VFP data entry form. In fact I suggested *NOT* doing that.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

I wonder what part is missing.

You write "example: they select 'John Doe' from the consumer table, click on a link that takes them to the questionnaire template, they enter the answers, then save only the answers into maybe a linked table or (text file saved to a general field)"
and then continue "the questionnaire is typed in ms office".

From that I interpret the part of storing the answers is just storing the finished word document and this part is missing from the current workflow.

You don't mention, if the process of selecting a person from the consumer table already exists and if your part should integrate into that or where your part comes.

Others already suggest this is not a good practie, as you finally don't get data you can continue to work on, eg validate answers and (half) automatically (despite the evaluation of narrative answers) determine correct answers of the questionnaire.

If that is not the topic of your task, that's fine. But then it looks like your main task is to take in a file name and store that file into a database. Is that so?

Looking at it from a more general point of view, what you decribe rather looks to me, as users will describe what they want to do, not thinking much about the previous and next steps in the workflow and what would make that much easier. The others are right about the point, that better strutured data about the single answers is needed to process the answers.

If the next step is, that others are then taking filled questionnaires from the database and evaluate them manually, then that's perhaps ok, but you also may simply mail the word docs as attachments to the next department involved in evaluating the answers. Storing the word docs into general fields is not winning anything in terms of data quality, is it?

Bye, Olaf.

 

[teering]

I would just be interfacing the document into an existing vfp program (database)

i will try the vfp forms approach and save answers in tables, that was my first instinct

thanks everyone


Teresa Pickering
Professional Computer Services