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The task at-hand is that I coordinate the activity of 20 organisations, each of whom I need to collect monthly data from directly, about the tonnages and types of elecronic items they collected for reuse and recycling. They all use different systems and processes so it's not a case of plugging into an existing system.

Rather than have 20 separate templates they fill out each month that I then have to check, collate and organise every month, I'm hoping there's a better (automatable) solution.

What I'm aiming for is that each organisation has access to an online data entry portal (say a google sheet), and they just copy and paste monthly numbers in once per month. I can then review these altogether monthly or less frequently.

Ideally they each have access to a single tab within a sheet with 20 tabs so I can keep it all in one place. Alternatively, we may have to have separate sheets for each. Would consider other options too.

Please let me know if you think there's a fairly simple way to do this, also simple enough for some users with low-average computer skills. If you think it would be better to use other systems than sheets, I would also be interested to know thoughts.

Thanks!

changingstate
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  • Lets start with a question to give some context: what's wrong with using a google sheet like you mentioned? – Nick.Mc Jun 23 '20 at 13:01
  • I wasn't sure that sheets would allow non-gmail account users to access a sheets doc. However, thanks for making me reflect on this as not only do you not need to sign up to gmail to get a google account, but in fact you need not sign up to google at all to edit a sheet shared with you. One can enable sharing settings that allow 'anyone with the link' to access and edit a google sheet via browser. Very useful, thanks! Now it's just about automating the collation of datasets periodically. – changingstate Jun 23 '20 at 17:28
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    There are some security considerations here. Anyone that gets the link can forward it on, then absolutely anyone can view or edit the sheet. If this is sensitive data in any way you should really secure it. The other consideration is: do you need to know who made the change? If neither of these things are important, then anonymous access is probably fine. Just be aware that anyone from any of these 20 sites could just delete all the data and you wouldn't know who it was. – Nick.Mc Jun 23 '20 at 23:25
  • You could always use google forms to achieve something similar. Or at least avoid some of the problems @Nick.McDermaid mentions by having separate sheets for each entity and then combining the results in one sheet. – a-burge Jun 24 '20 at 07:50

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