> As for some of the other responses, I don't think Drupal is the right
> tool for anything other than eating up CPU cycles and bandwidth.  There

Drupal is awesome, if your site will look and function like a Drupal site.  
Things like forums, image galleries, etc, are pretty much automatically 
available with no coding.

But, if you stray too far from what they do, and if you want it to look 
certain ways, then you start to fight the framework.  If you know Drupal 
well, you can make it work, but then you're interfacing with code you didn't 
write.  If you're new, it might hurt.  

That's true for any framework.  I do a lot of Ruby on Rails.  It makes custom 
web development easy, if you do it their way.  And their way is slick.  But 
if you decided you didn't want a database-driven MVC webapp, rails might just 
get in the way.

There's a lot of tools that could do the job.  What languages or tools do you 
already know, or if you plan on learning a new one, which direction do you 
want to go in your coding career?  

Jeremy

> If you needs are relatively simple, take a look at the Forms
> functionality with Google Docs.  Once you define the form, any submitted
> forms get dumped into spreadsheet that can be exported to .csv, .html,
> .ods, .pdf, .txt, and .xls.
>
> -Chris
>
> Tom Penney wrote:
> > Forgive the off topic post. I was hoping that someone might have some
> > advice for me.
> >
> > I've been handed a home brew data entry system written in VB6 that is
> > in need of replacement. Code is poorly commented and the guy who wrote
> > it can't be found. What I would LIKE to do is start from scratch and
> > write a nice browser based system using google gears or something like
> > that but I don't have time. I would think there would be a ton of
> > stuff available, open or otherwise, as we are not doing anything
> > unusual. But what I've found seems antiquated and expensive. I was
> > asked to evaluate some Viking Software stuff which has the features
> > that we need but, man, low tech, 8 character file names,  keyboard
> > overlays required, etc.
> >
> > We process about 10,000 hand written forms a month entered from
> > scanned images on screen. Each form is entered twice by separate
> > people and compared  for accuracy. some fields are looked up in a
> > table  to auto populate other fields which can then be accepted or
> > edited. nothing to fancy. Has anyone here run across anything I should
> > be looking into?