On Wed, 08 Jul 1998 14:34:53 -0700, Bruce L Young <byoung@acsu.buffalo.edu> wrote:

>My department is seriously considering an investment in Cardiff's >Teleform software to handle input of our survey forms prior to >manipulations and analysis with Access, SAS, and/or SPSS. My sense is >that Teleform is a "gold standard" of sorts for OCR and OMR, and that >few other programs handle both as effectively - if they handle both at >all. I'd greatly appreciate additional feedback on the following:

There are other more expensive packages out there. Depends on the volume of your business. > >1. Comparisons of Teleform with other OCR and OMR technologies: Which >other programs handle both? What are their advantages and >disadvantages, for form developers, for entry personnel, and for >analysts?

>2. Comparisons of Teleform with manual entry: Does Teleform *really* >save time when one accounts for form development, programming, >troubleshooting, and form scanning? (I've spoken with a couple of >colleagues who refuse to use Teleform because it does not, in their >experience.) What are the long-term additional expenses associated with >proper use of Teleform?

I tried Teleform, and abandoned it. The local VAR we used was a charlatan, so this may have biased my opinion. I notice Cardiff is offering consulting services themselves to help clients get up and running--kind of hints that it's not useable right out of the box. Briefly, I found that Teleform was very fussy about the quality of the survey forms. Good xerox was not good enough. Even laserjet originals sometimes didn't get accepted as "forms". We would try rescanning them, and they might work. The software didn't seem to be able to hunt around at all for its (large) registration marks. It wasn't too bad on simple mark sensing. The OCR was laughable. If a character touched the box lines, it threw it out. Even careful printing was poorly recognised. I can't imagine how the fax back can work--we couldn't get past paper forms. Keeping multipage surveys properly collated was a little iffy. The user interface says "engineer" all over it. Took me back to CPM days. It keeps the forms as tif files, so have a big drive. The forms designer is a little constraining, in this day of sophisticated page design tools. To be fair, Cardiff is trying hard, and they issued several updates, but I have lost patience. We're trying Remark now, since it costs way less, and can be applied to existing surveys. Actually, when we analysed the time, scanning wasn't all that quick for us. Although we bought a good Fujitsu scanner with a feeder and an 80 MEG Pentium, it isn't that much faster overall. My visions of loading it with 500 forms at 6 pm, going home, and returning to work the next day to an SPSS data file were, well, visions. Open questions require on-the-fly coding, which my data-entry drones do well.. So, it's not for us, but it could be for someone who had a lot of closed question forms. I spoke to the Angus Reid data-entry shop, (who I had been wrongly told used Teleform), and they were happy with their very expensive scanning system, but they do tons of polls, and they had spent a few years working closely with their supplier to iron out the bugs. I may get a flood of email for this, saying how Teleform has improved, and I mustn't know what I'm doing. I've been using software long enough to recognize unfriendly, immature, and buggy software. I don't buy it. Or, at least, I only buy it once. Doug

************************************************************* Doug Hoy Evaluation National Museum of dhoy@nmstc.ca & Science & Technology (613)998-6863v Research P.O.Box 9724, Station T (613)990-3654f Ottawa K1G 5A3 CANADA **Opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by the NMSTC** *************************************************************