Sometimes you may have a bunch of new data to enter into Trakker and your just looking for a quick way to manually enter it. Yes it’s repetitive, but it needs to be done.
Of course you might contact us and see if we can create an import process for the data, but other times it just might be quicker to enter it yourself. (I know I will sometimes just manually enter it because I know it’s a one-time thing and by the time I figures out a good import query process, I would have been done
with the onetime data entry. Plus it is also sometimes somehow relaxing to just manually do something repetitive.)
These tips are specifically for entering new data, not editing existing. Editing existing may involve some similar steps, but I do a different process.
The Steps
So here’s how I do it.
- First off I make sure I have cleared space off on my desk so I have plenty of room to spread out the mouse and keyboard to
- I also prefer to work on a computer with at least 2 monitors
- I hopefully have the data on my computer in an excel spreadsheet or other document.
- If I only have a physical copy… I make a little more room on my physical desk.
- If it’s digital I put the document on one screen and Open Trakker on the other (If I only have one monitor I try and slide the document as far to sone side of the screen as possible and will do the same with the data entry screen in Trakker)
- I open up Trakker and go to the area I’m doing the data entry on.
- If the document is an Excel document, try to reorganize the columns into the same order they will go into Trakker
- Click Add New +
- Now that I have created space were I can see both Trakker and the data I am wanting to enter I try and optimize the following:
- Put the cursor in the document field use the up (or down) arrow key to move the cursor out of the field then press the opposite (up or down) to move the cursor back into the desired field
- Press ctrl-c (copy)
- Use the mouse to click the Trakker form and click the first data entry field
- Leave the mouse hovering over this first field
- keep the physical mouse in a location near the keyboard that you will be able to quickly move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse without having to move anything
- Press ctrl-v
- Alt-Tab (this should move back to the (excel) document
- Right Arrow (to move to the next field
- ctrl-c
- Alt-Tab (should move back to Trakker)
- Tab (move to the next Trakker data field)
- ctrl-v
- REPEAT previous 6 steps until each of those fields are copied from the document into Trakker
- Press F10 (This will save the Trakker Record and open a New Trakker Record)
- Click the (left) button on the mouse (this should put the cursor back in the 1st Trakker field)
- Alt-Tab (back to Excel)
- Repeat (and refine) until done
- NOTES:
- As you are doing this you may make adjustments to the placement of the forms, or the physical mouse etc.
- I usually even find specific ways to place my hands on the keyboard and mouse for the fastest movement
- In the process above I will often just have my left hand hovering over the ctrl-c, ctrl-v, and Alt-Tab and my right move between the arrow keys on the keyboard and the left button on the mouse.
- NOTES:
Again, this is not the ideal way to load data, but when it’s only a few dozen records or maybe even up to 200 records, this can be a quick way of getting the data I need in quickly. If I have more I will either create special insert database queries or possibly build a windows macro BOT to load the data.
I hope this is helpful for those times when you just need to get a little bit of new data in quickly