Digitization Service

Ah, data entry. The words alone send a thrill up and down your spine, cause your arm hairs to stand on end, and give you a little shiver of excitement, don’t they? Data entry. Data processing. The sweet melody of those words. But enough about that. What does it even mean?

A guide to data entry and data processing for the unlearned

Introduction

Simply put, data entry / data processing is the act of entering data (information) into a computer. It refers to the transcribing of information from one source to another, so it does not involve the generation of new information – the information to be entered will already exist in one form or another.

A classic example of data entry or data processing would be taking something that is hand written, for example a survey form, and entering it into a computer program such as a spreadsheet. Thus is data (the survey answers) being transcribed into a format that is usable by a computer. Obviously, the survey answers are much more useful to the person gathering the data than just the handwritten forms, as once entered into the spreadsheet, the data can be manipulated, used to generate graphs, and so on.

In a senses, in the above example, the data that is ‘trapped’ in the paper forms is ‘freed’ by being entered into a computer, where the meaning of the data (the trends and so forth that many survey forms will reveal) can be extracted in a way that is meaningful to a human audience.

History

Data entry and data processing have been around since the invention of computers, as it is by definition the only way of getting info from the world around us ‘into’ the computer, where operations can be performed on it, and outputs produced from it. While the bulk of data entry / data processing today is done with a keyboard, the terms really cover any mode of input, so even after we’re all talking to our computers (presumably this will eventually happen), data entry will still exist.

Working in data entry / data processing

You’re probably thinking that working in data entry or data processing would be pretty tedious, and guess what: you’re right. There’s no way to dress it up – feeding data into a computer all day is a pretty rotten way to spend your time on this big old blue ball of ours.

If you are forced into unenviable this type of work, you will have the right to an impressive title: data entry clerk. The bulk of the work that data entry clerks do is to transcribe paper documents into an electronic form. Today, data entry clerks will often start not with a physical document, but with one that has been scanned. Many companies today will scan all incoming mail as a matter of course, enabling them to recycle the paper copy and save on storage. The data entry clerk would then be responsible for running an Optical Character Recognition program on it, which converts the picture file of a scan into a text file. These programs usually don’t work perfectly though, and so the data entry clerk needs to check the text file against the scan and correct errors.

Finally

And that’s the full story on data entry / data processing. Want to know more? Search online or try your local bookstore for further information.