Hi, Caroline.

I recommend Forms Mode for Emacs.

In case you don’t know: Emacs is a pretty unusual piece of software.  It was 
born 40 years ago but was last updated an hour ago.  It’s been under continuous 
development for longer than half the U.S. population has been alive*.  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs 

Forms Mode comes with Emacs.  It’s designed for data entry.  It might be really 
hard to get set up initially, but once that is done, you can expect it to “just 
work” for a long, long time.  (At least another 40 years?)

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/forms.html

In case you know Emacs as some musty relic that only neckbearded computer-room 
people dare to use, consider these websites:
        http://sachachua.com/blog/category/emacs/
        http://emacsrocks.com/
        http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_package_system.html
        http://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/ask

One nice result of using Forms Mode is that with a little work, you can 
completely prevent wasted keystrokes.**
  
Cheers,
--Dave



* http://www.censusscope.org/us/chart_age.html

** Field 3 is always three digits?  Jump to field four after the 3rd digit.  
Automatically open the data entry file when you start the program?  No 
problem...  Etc.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 12:39 PM, Caroline Li <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've heard that entering data manually into spreadsheets (which I've
> always done) is frowned upon. Is there free software available for
> data entry? Apparently some people use Google Forms, but maybe
> there's an option better geared to scientific data?
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