Jim, while I have no real help to offer, as it appears that you have walked a mile in your users' moccasins, I could perhaps offer some moral support. I had never done any "real" data entry until around 1992 ; by real, I mean eyes-on-the-paper and fingers on the 10-key in a high-volume transaction-oriented environment.
Of course, the system has to work. It has to be reliable and fast. It has to be the virtual equivalent of the paper, with ERR-checking and remain in-phase w/the data-entry user. Well, I'm sure that you know all that. So, I built a DB in RB to acquire, maintain, and output cotton crop development data. Man, I thought I knew a thing or two about user i/f design, until the data cards started arriving en masse, and, did I mention, a deadline to meet f/getting the crop summary report to the researcher(s) and/or media. Well, I didn't know half as much at the start as I did a month or so into high-summer. Even though I'm from the South and was working in this ag-sector, I'd never been in a cotton field, much less collected the observation data. Although my system worked, I learned quickly that it's real (TOO) damn easy to sit in an air-conditioned office in July or August, looking out the window at a manicured lawn, and make someone else's life that much harder - I took my own field(s) the next year and got a real education about how hard (manual) data acquisition can be, esp. when there's no good way to instrument an organism, be it a crab or a cotton plant. Now, jump fwd 10 years and consider the typical developer, excluding, based on the recent list messages about RB developer/user ages. They are GUI-only, MAC/WIN, mouse-dependent, organization sycophants (oops, gettin' too cynical) who brag about VB skills and anything related to WWW. Now, try teaching 'em about data entry. Man, they look at you like you're from Mars, if not farther out in space. Then their eyes glaze over when you say 10-key, and, oh, BTW, you need to press the NUM_LK key - you can tell by that little green light, "Oh, that's what that's for." and, if you're lucky and have a decent individual, "Cool, I learned something." Then, later, they show you something in VB/ACCESS/Whatever, and, when you ask about field-to-field navigation, they tell you "The users can just press the TAB key or use the mouse." Then, rather than calling them unaware (sycophantic, as they obviously are trying to get paid f/lowering productivity) idiots, you grab a legal length notepad and a keyboard, covering all but the 10-key area telling them, "Data-entry means this is all you got to work with! There ain't no mouse and there ain't no TAB key. C'ain't nothin' be in the user's way. They need their eyes on the paper and their fingers on the 10-key. Period. End of story. No but's and don't argue, 'cause Mr. Steve, aka the Great and Powerful OZ, has spoken, and verily, he is RIGHT!" Umm, well, you see, I've been there. And I'm there now, but it's related to public opinion research rather than cotton. Later, Steve in Memphis PS - I might plant a bit of (naturally) colored cotton out beside my garage this year, now that the boll weevil eradication program has been goin' a few years. If so, and I get a decent emergence rate, and fruit retention remains high ... well, I won't be countin' nodes, bolls, inches, or any other useful metric. But I will still consider myself to be in "high cotton"! -SiM > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On > Behalf Of Jim Blackburn > Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 6:45 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: Screen Restore > > > Thanks Ben, and everyone else that chipped in. > I have settled on informing the user as the solution. Rows below > the insert or delete do not reflect the change until the cursor > passes over them. > > I did realize one big improvement - I had been using: > delete row from table where idfield = .vbl > > changing to DELROW smoothed that up a lot. > > Next time you go to a fish restaurant and have Snow Crab, think > of our observers on vessels in the middle of the Bering sea in > February, along the ice edge, measuring a sample of crab. Then, a > key-punch operator going over the data, and this routine helping > the data correction routine to find one extra crab keyed in 120 > measured from one trap. > > Thanks, > Jim Blackburn > Kodiak > > Ben Petersen wrote: > > > > Jim, > > > > (If you're RBW) I have tried a number of different things to get a > > region to display properly after eeps have modified it's contents. > > Inserting a pre-determined number of rows and only using "edi > > using" works best. > > > > You can have your eep do > > prevtab > > recalc table > > nexttab > > > > But the cursor lands on the first row of the region and most often is > > not visible. I also had problems crashing RBase this way, though I > > suspect that was more to do with with eeps conflicting with one > > another. > > > > Ben Petersen > ================================================ > TO SEE MESSAGE POSTING GUIDELINES: > Send a plain text email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > In the message body, put just two words: INTRO rbase-l > ================================================ > TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send a plain text email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > In the message body, put just two words: UNSUBSCRIBE rbase-l > ================================================ > TO SEARCH ARCHIVES: > http://www.mail-archive.com/rbase-l%40sonetmail.com/ > ================================================ TO SEE MESSAGE POSTING GUIDELINES: Send a plain text email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the message body, put just two words: INTRO rbase-l ================================================ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send a plain text email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the message body, put just two words: UNSUBSCRIBE rbase-l ================================================ TO SEARCH ARCHIVES: http://www.mail-archive.com/rbase-l%40sonetmail.com/
