remote data collection

[whitejl]

I work for a company that does a lot of field data collection. However they are still in 19th century (logsheets). I would like to have the field guys use tablets to collect this data and send it to office sometime during the day. We currently have excel spreadsheets where this data goes, here we analyze and chart various issues.
How is the best way to have operator collect data (i.e excel, etc), then have it sent to office (by email, cloud, etc?), then have it fed into the current excel file?

 

[Mr. Lucky]

I think the answer depends a lot on what you do with the collected data. If it simply needs to be read and collated, I think your best (and easiest) bet would be to create a Word or RTF version of the paper logsheets, and have the field people load them to a secure cloud account (Boxcryptor with Dropbox works well for this). Back at the office, you could glean the required info and do a mail-merge on the discrete files. OfficeSuite Pro does the most faithful document rendering IMO.

Of course, if you need to filter, sort, or otherwise massage the data, then you are looking at a totally different solution.