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iPhone plus Google Docs Equals Useful Data Capture Device

July 14th, 2008

By combining the iPhone’s web browsing capabilities with Google Docs, it’s possible to set up a very simple data capture system that is fast to implement and very low cost. Maybe you can use this information to convince your boss to fund an iPhone for you?

Here’s a sample form to have a play with, either on your iPhone or via a PC. Here’s a link to the resulting spreadsheet (view access only).

If you fill in the form, you should see the results in a a few minutes, plus other people’s entries. One of the great things about Google Docs is sharing documents. If you have a look at the resulting spreadsheet you’ll also notice you can also include live links to web content like photographs.

I have set up a simple spreadsheet to capture my business expenses for GST Business Activity Statement purposes. It works very well and it means I can update the spreadsheet as the expense happens rather than spending hours doing data entry at the end of each quarter.

Similarly, mailing lists can be added to by field sales reps when they have time between sales calls. There are many applications for this fast and inexpensive mobile data capture system.

To set up your own iPhone-Google docs data capture system here are the steps:

1. Get yourself a Google Docs account
2. Create a spreadsheet in your Docs account with the fields that you need to capture data for.
3. Convert the spreadsheet to a form from within the Google Docs system. This takes less than a minute. At this point you can specify radio buttons, drop-down lists and so on.
4. E-mail the link that the form generates to your iPhone or PDA.
5. Start capturing data.

Once you’ve entered the form data there is now way to edit it except to log in to the spreadsheet. Each entry from the form has has a timestamp.

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Categories: Interesting Stuff, Uncategorized, computers and IT |