Making a data input error is easy due to the tedium of the job, but one wrong character can send the wrong person to surgery or an innocent person to jail. Convenience and quality of output are equally important, since data that cannot be read or that does not convey both the information and the impression needed is ineffective. Computer speed is a key factor in determining whether a particular task can be effectively done on the computer. This paper examines all three factors and provides insight into what each option is best suited to accomplish.
Keypunch used to be the only data input option, but now we have others that can be chosen for their appropriateness to specific tasks. For example, telephone survey data can be entered by keyboard, but voice recognition software might be considered if the responses were primarily yes/no answers. For printed questionnaires, keyboard input is necessary unless only the image of the questionnaire is needed (not data committed to individual fields in a database); then, the questionnaires can be scanned into the system. If the questionnaire data can be retrieved via computer, an electronic form could be used so that as data is typed in on the computer, it is automatically stored in the proper fields.
Bank checks are "read" by an optical character recognition (OCR) scanner and then captured into the computer system by special computer-assisted encoding facilities. Retail tags can display bar codes that are scanned into the system with hand scanners or scanners at the register site, virtually eliminating human error. Long documents are subject to the same options as printed questionnaires; they can be input by keyboard or scanned in as images. Since they take longer to key in, the work can be done by more than one person using Microsoft Word and outline view (Techniques for Managing Long Documents in Word).
Since convenience and quality of output are also important, the best optio...