Quote Originally Posted by OptionBase1 View Post
If you need to be vague, that's fine. But what isn't adding up is why a spreadsheet template is easy and a web form is out of the question, when in both cases, they are presumably taking the data from [Their App] and (copying/pasting?) the data into (your solution).

You are basically asking us to help you make a process easier, when no one here has a clue what is happening on either end of said process.

That being said, my suggestion is to give them multiple options. Give them the spreadsheet template and give them a web form, and maybe other options. Basically, you seem to be deciding for them what they will view as tedious. Maybe they don't feel the same way. Maybe some of these entities are savvy enough to build a bot that fills out the web form for them with whatever data they have. Who knows.

Good luck.
I'm not trying to be vague. Technically, we haven't quite nailed down WHAT data we are going to get from them, but it has been done via emailed spreadsheets in the past, so I know that will work...one way or another.

We have no clue what is happening on their end. This is biological survey data, of which we will get some subset including species numbers and about one to two dozen other fields. They could be doing darn near anything (including making stuff up, but we hope not). I know that at least one person is just scribbling on a piece of paper, and another is a multinational group that sends us a thousand page book every year covering everything they did around the world, even though we can't possibly make use of it. I have no idea why they do that. Perhaps they just want to get the word out about what they do, perhaps it's just easier, since they had the thing lying around. So, what are they doing for data collection? It could be a high-tech distributed operation, it could be scraps of paper, we have no idea.

I was originally thinking of a web form, but the only web forms I have ever seen require the user to type data into each field. We have those one to two dozen fields, but there could be anywhere from zero to several thousand lines (probably only a few hundred, on average). They won't be using our form to collect the data. They don't work for us, or with us. The data they are required to supply is in compliance with a permit. So, if we use a web form, my only experience with them would suggest that they'd be doing a LOT of typing, with all the typos that can come along with that. If there is a web form solution that allows the copying and pasting of large blocks of data, that would be great, but that's why I'm asking, because I don't know of anything like that.

At this point, the suggestion about MS 365 seems like it would work the easiest, but if there's a way to blast a large table into a web form in a set format, that would be what I'm looking for.