A bag of FSEDIT tricks

For data entry applications, the FSEDIT procedure provides a good user interface. With reasonable care and knowledge, an FSEDIT screen will yield well-organized, reasonably clean data for analysis. However, what happens when that reasonable care and knowledge are not a given, especially when that application is to be remotely supported, and/or extensive training is not an option? How can you help improve the data quality while retaining that user-friendly, non-technical interface? Screen Control Language (SCL) makes it possible, but there are several non-obvious techniques that also help accomplish that end. In addition, there are other, non-SCL methods that will aid the FSEDIT screen programmer in eliminating data problems at entry. It is always easier to build an application for yourself than to build one for other people to use because you know how everything is supposed to work. This paper details five solutions to problems that have been presented to us by our users. They are: how to annotate a specific item in a data set; improving data quality at entry; maintaining an intuitive interface when there is a category called "other (specify)"; how to protect existing data from inattentive entry people; and finally, how to handle phone numbers for painless entry and storage. These are some of the tricks we have developed and use in the distributed entry applications we have created. The methodologies shown can be extrapolated to many other situations.