Monday, 30 March 2015

Form Data Capture - Making Your Research Easier

A lot of you that read this article will without doubt be interested in data capture, perhaps how it works, how it can help and where the best places are to seek out the service. Well you've come to the right place.

In this article I'll be talking about form data capture, a type of data capture that allows the fields, check boxes and text areas to be captured and the data rendered digitally enabling you to see the results easily, without having to go through each individual form making a tally for yourself. This kind of service is often used by market researchers, employers and people and companies in general who issue surveys, feedback forms and other typed of general research data.

For a long time in the past form capture was done manually. These days, thankfully, it is a standard process to hand your forms over to a professional document scanning and data capture company for them to extract the data and send it back to you when completed. This is a fairly simple and inexpensive process which can save you a lot of time, money and resources.

The form capture company will usually set out a template for their industry quality software to look at and assess each field to look for data such as check boxes and written areas. Unfortunately areas that have been filled out by hand can not usually be scanned using data capture as technology right now can only read printed fonts, but it is still pretty inexpensive to outsource this to a document scanning and data capture company to input the data manually. It will obviously take a little longer, but the information could be very valuable to you. Often clients will also call to ask for our opinion and general tips on how to set out a survey or feedback form so it is easier for us to scan and quicker to process. However this doesn't mean that you have to stick to our guidelines, as I say the document scanning company can set up a template for the scanners and software to look at and assess.

Once the scanning is complete, the data that has been captured will then usually be produced into some sort of presentation for you, usually with statistics and graphs so you can look through the information gathered in a simple and unconfusing way.

Data capture of forms has been known to help thousands of companies every year to gather their data with the greatest of ease to them, saving time, money and manpower, and the results are usually highly accurate. However make sure to choose a good company and ask if you can send them some samples before you commit to them. The samples will give you a good suggestion of how good the company's technology and staff are and ultimately that's what matters.

Form capture is a great tool if used correctly and done by a reputable scanning company. It could help your business save potentially thousands of pounds per year.

Steve Wright is marketing manager at Pearl Scan Solutions, a UK based document scanning and document management company offering services throughout the UK. We also data capture forms and offer a wide variety of data capture services.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Form-Data-Capture---Making-Your-Research-Easier&id=5919714

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