Spreadsheets with Form-based User Input
The image below shows an example of a spreadsheet with a form to control user input. The spreadsheet itself contains multiple worksheets, each containing a large amount of data that must be entered and formatted correctly.
There are two main advantages of using form-based spreadsheets:
- The form makes it much easier to find the entry to be edited. In the example above, instead of manually searching the entire workbook for the details of a specific boat, the user enters the boat number into the No: text box and clicks the Find Boat button - the details of the required boat are extracted from the worksheet (which contains over 2500 entries) and displayed in the fields (controls) on the form in less than one second.
- The form also makes it much easier for the user to enter
information accurately. Where the data is constrained to a range of values,
these are presented in a dropdown list from which the user chooses the
appropriate one - much more accurate than typing the values in manually.
In the example above, fields with dropdown lists are indicated by the presence
of an arrow -
.
Note that the Mooring: dropdown (circled)
has been clicked which caused the dropdown list to be expanded to show
the available values from which the user has selected the third item.
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