>I am about to start coding a new app and I am thinking about making a grid the centrepiece of the action.
>
>At its simplest, this grid will be used to display items in a tender and allow external contractors to enter their bids against the items.
>
>This sounds simple but this is a high end application and it will require heavy validation from a variety of data sources (I won't bore you with the details).
>
>I have read in a couple of books that grids are not reccomended for data entry. Is this still the case.

I think the usual mantra is generally true, avoid entry in grids. However, I am stuck with user-reqs at times that *require* grid-edits, so it's not an option, and I just build it after whining a little.

For these cases, it works quite well - though I recommend using views as an interface with grids for any editing situations, it makes life easier and safer.