Gathering data using an external questionnaire

September 30, 200223 yr

Newbies

Hi folks. Just want to pick your collective brains about the possibilities here. I've tried to make this as short as possible, sorry it's so long! Please hang in there...

I have a client master database, with company, name, office, e-mail address etc. fields and then a series of related databases (I'll call them sub-databases) linked by a unique identifier based on company and name. All this works ok.

Part of what I'm doing requires the clients' input which involves responding to a questionnaire. I then need to get this information into one of my sub-databases.

At the moment it's not feasible to do it directly via Web interface for various reasons, the most important being that as yet we don't have a company website for our little consulting firm.

A year and a half ago I bought a Visual Basic book and developed an "application" using forms over MS Excel (which 99.999% of the clients have, along with a Windows PC) and it has worked a treat. I e-mail a <1MB file out, it is distributed to 100+ individuals, they use it, it creates a text file for each individual and then the individuals (manually) create and send an e-mail to me, attaching the text file. They then delete the original "application".

Trouble with the Visual Basic "application" is:

1. it requires a lot of code which means that it isn't very easy to carry out modifications to it

2. it is a pain in the neck to adapt it to different client companies

3. it's not pretty, and not feasible to make it very pretty.

I have looked into using a runtime solution created from Developer but:

1. it requires 2 files (the executable and the database) to be sent out.

2. the file size of the executable is more than 1MB (typical limit on allowable single message size in most companies).

Any fab ideas out there about possible platform or other options for the questionnaire? Maybe there is a much simpler way of going about all this from the start?

Thanks for any responses. These forums are gold for picking up practical knowledge about good old FMP.