I'm looking for a way to enter forms offline (daily progress, job hazard analysis forms) to upload weekly/daily when internet is available to some kind of hosted service that will keep the database and allow people to pull reports. i've identified some companies in the past that do with this, but i'm having trouble finding them again.

i'm able to make something in Access that would work on one computer (although I would prefer to give PDF's to a company and let them set it up), but I don't know enough about how to set it up for multiple people to use. i've made something like that in the past but it didn't need to be very good before, now it does.

i vaguely remember a local company (apex or cary) that did this, I'm coming up empty know

anyone have any ideas?

[Edited on March 22, 2013 at 6:48 PM. Reason : so frustrating]

3/22/2013 6:47:09 PM

http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2375012

3/22/2013 8:48:26 PM

I didn't know that you could edit Google Docs offline, but Google Docs doesn't really do what I need


In the past I saw a company that creates a form(s) from a PDF you give them then creates the database. They allowed you to do web entry or they could pull from an emailed PDF form, both work well with our workflow. Then you can setup whatever queries or reports you want (and they will help) and access everything. One of these companies was local, but now I can't find them.

3/22/2013 9:55:58 PM

maybe the friendly folks at SuperUser or StackOverflow could help

3/22/2013 10:13:03 PM

you can use an excel spreadsheet using cv values to input tables into a database and then back out again... providing you know a little bit about coding... And I'm pretty sure someone has already made this possible since the idea is pretty simple to do; any 2nd year programmer could make something like this in a few hours, depending on how much data needs to be organized and categorized. Then using some sort of plug-in with a CMS & database to output a nice report into a PDF format.

3/22/2013 11:00:08 PM

shit, i could do this for you

For a hefty price

3/22/2013 11:03:33 PM

create a local copy of the db on the machine you're entering data into. use your app front end for the data entry. sync database to an online replica when you have a connection

3/23/2013 1:26:42 AM

^^online companies will do this for $15-$50/month, can you match that?

^that gets sloppy with multiple users

[Edited on March 23, 2013 at 7:15 AM. Reason : .]

3/23/2013 7:14:26 AM

LiveConnect or Remoteware (older) are the first solutions that come to mind.

3/23/2013 8:17:35 AM

looking for something like:

https://www.zoho.com/creator/

except I know there are companies that will set it up for you, and I'm trying to find those. (also, I'd have to look into what it would take to do offline entry to zoho. they probably can accept from email though so it might work)

my googling keeps turning up
http://www.wufoo.com/
http://www.emailmeform.com/
http://www.formsite.com/
and some of them are very similar to what i need, but i found some before that did custom forms from a PDF and hosted the database. one was local, i think based in apex. cary, or raleigh

if you are bored and just want to help me google, I'll give you a finders fee if you find what i need. $20?

[Edited on March 23, 2013 at 8:32 AM. Reason : .]

3/23/2013 8:30:22 AM

write to flat file and then use map reduce to merge and transform

3/23/2013 8:49:30 AM

I don't know how to do that, so I'm trying to find a company that does

3/23/2013 11:40:09 AM