>>And when you try to explain it to marketing, they don't understand. That's when I sit them down to the 'flashy' DE screen along with a representative stack of whatever needs entering and tell them they have 15 minutes to enter the stack. They'll start seeing the light. Of course, this is also assuming that you can get to someone in the marketing department to do that.
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>>I have, however, done that to management types, both mine and my customers, to show them the difference between 'flash' and data entry.
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>I've seen an operator who would enter about 600 invoices, with an average of about 8 line items, in 3-4 hours. He was so well versed in the stuff, he knew the codes of the most sold items by heart, so he'd even correct the mistakes that were on papers he was typing from (this is '87, they didn't have any computers in their shops, he was creating invoices from hand written purchase orders). He loved to work second shift, 14:00-22:00, which meant he'd do his daily work no later than 18:00 and had evening off almost every day.
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>Now with the technological progress, this has become impossible today. He was dragging a finger of his left hand over the paper, and typed using only his right hand, on the numeric keypad. Digits, enter, and once a week a minus sign was all he needed - he'd have to type customer's code, date, line item codes and quantities. His fingers were just a bit of fog over the keypad.
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>Now imagine him having to press Tab after each field.
My first .Net desktop application had a data entry form and I was informed, rather strongly, that the TAB key just wouldn't work - they must have the ENTER key - the TAB key slowed them down too much. Took about a week to figure out how to do it, but I did. I think that was around 2002(?) and, as far as I know, they're still using it and it's been through a few version updates.