What is Quick-XL? Quick-XL is program for entering data into Microsoft Excel® spreadsheets. It is designed to provide a highly ergonomic way to get data entered as quickly as possible. Now, there are basically only two ways to get data into an Excel spreadsheet, import it or enter it. For those of you who have a program that will import all of their data, Quick-XL is not for you. That is unless you happen to want to add a special column to the data in your spreadsheet that is not provided by the import program, say some demographic information that you didn't happen to think of when the import program was designed and it might be a couple of more months until the IT department is able to fit you into their schedule and upgrade your import program. Who can use Quick-XL? Quick-XL was designed to work in businesses of all sizes, from a micro business to Fortune 100 companies. It is easy to learn, highly intuitive and low cost. Who doesn't need Quick-XL? If you are in a large business that has an IT department and you happen to belong to a department that is high priority in the eyes of the IT department and you can, whenever it suites you, snap your fingers and have a guy show up from the IT department who will implement a custom solution for you before you finish sipping your coffee, then Quick-XL is probably not for you. If you are an amateur programmer and have lots of time to fool around writing VBA programs to do what you want done, then Quick-XL is probably not of you. If you don't know what VBA is or if you don't have the time to learn it, then Quick-XL is definitely for you. What are the Benefits of Quick-XL? For all of the rest of us, who either don't have an IT department or who are not treated like gods by them, Quick-XL is for you. If you have ever entered data into an Excel spreadsheet without the benefit of a form into which to enter your data, then you already have some idea of the basic benefit of Quick-XL. But Quick-XL goes beyond displaying a brain-dead data entry form that is customized for your Excel spreadsheet. Quick-XL has a simple Setup program that lets you tell Quick-XL about the nature of each of the columns of your data so that when you actually enter the data, Quick-XL is able to provide a data entry experience that is customized to the specific type of data being entered. Quick-XL makes it easy to see a row of data at a glance, without having to scan and scroll across a spreadsheet. You don't have to worry about your eyes accidentally shifting to the next row. Quick-XL also has long text fields that can be formatted into paragraphs without messing up the look of your spreadsheet by making the row on which they appear so tall that the rows are not uniform in size or by overlapping into the next column. For example, if the particular data element you are entering is a date, Quick-XL provides a couple of specialized keystrokes designed to simplify the entry of dates. If you start by typing a period (.), then the date field is filled with today's date. If you then hit the plus (+) key, the date is incremented by one day. Minus (-) reduces the date by one day. If you are entering a date that is not close to today's date, like a birthday, for example, it would normally be entered as mm/dd/yyyy. Quick-XL allows you to enter the date as mm.dd.yyyy or mm.dd or mm.dd.yy. In each of these cases, Quick-XL changes the periods to slashes (/). You can thank Microsoft for their computation of a reasonable value for yyyy in the cases of mm/dd and mm/dd/yy. What are the Costs? The best news is that Quick-XL costs under $10.00 per year per computer, regardless of the number of Excel spreadsheets on which you use Quick-XL. This means that even if you enter only a small amount of data, it's still worth buying. It's just a handy tool to have around. |
