Villeroy wrote:Where is your group? Same home network, company network, anywhere on the internet?
How big is that group? Dozends, thousands, millions?
How trustworthy is that group in respect to the data you are collecting? Is it about gaming, gambling, club membership, life insurance, health care, sex?
What can you tell about their computer skills and software? Do they all run Libre/OpenOffice or is the existance of an internet browser all you can presume?
Thank you for your reply.
The group would be spread out and would likely be measured in the dozens initially. I cannot imagine it would ever be measured in thousands. This is not for a commercial purpose so we are not all coworkers. I don't foresee collecting data that anyone would be particularly concerned about. No health or financial information, etc. The group would all be people comfortable with the internet. I am comfortable requiring people to have LibreOffice if that is required to make the whole thing work.
Villeroy wrote:Of course you could use a LibreOffice form if everybody in that group has LibreOffice or OpenOffice to fill out that form and if you have some kind of database server on a network which is accessible to all group members. They fill out the database form and the form is submitted to your database server. This should work fine in a company where all use the same software on the same network. But are you able to set up a database? This is development work, nothing for people who call themselves "LibreEndUser".
I apologize if my username is inappropriate. I only thought it was both humorous and descriptive. I do not consider myself a power user as should be obvious by my need to ask this question. I am however willing to take a little time to learn something, which my posting here hopefully reinforces.
Now, it may be that my skills are insufficient to accomplish my goals. That would be an acceptable result of my inquiry. So, lets see if that is the case.
It seems that as a threshold issue I need access to a server available to the group over the internet. What is the easiest resolution of that problem? What is the most common resolution of that problem? A google drive? Something else?
Next, I would need to be able to set up a database. I have never done so and my initial post indicates that I was uncertain whether I would require Base or whether Calc might be sufficient. However, if a database is required then the question is whether I can learn what it takes to do so? Again, if it is something that I will not be able to do (perhaps it requires that I learn to program in some archaic computer language) then that is a valuable take away from my inquiry here.
Villeroy wrote:Of course, it would be preferable if they could fill out a form in their internet browser. This is how this forum works when you submit a posting. The posting is stored in a databsae. However, this is somewheat "high tech" and requires a lot of preparation for dozends users as for a million users. I guess that some of the linked survey software has prepared solutions for all this if you are willing to store your group's data on other people's servers.
I imagine that this "high tech" solution is more difficult than the database on a shared network solution you began with. As such, I'll just leave this one alone on the assumption that I should tackle the easier method if I am going to tackle anything at all.
Villeroy wrote:If you can presume a certain level of computer skills, just send them a spreadsheet and write a macro program to aggregate all the incoming sheets into one data table which can be analysed. Or simply do manual copy and paste which is a lot faster than writing a macro program if we are talking about a group of hundreds.
So, this was my initial thought and I posted here in an attempt to ascertain whether I might benefit from trying something else. If in fact I cannot do something that automates some of that process (or if the effort to learn how turns out to be too onerous) then I expect that I will rely on this process. So, I guess the good news is that somehow progress will be made... All that is left is to determine how to proceed.
Thanks again for the reply. I hope my detailed response is helpful in framing future responses.