Software for phone logs?

July 7, 2008 11:53 AM

I have binders full of paper phone logs. I want to move them to some electronic format. What to use?

I work in a research lab and I have to recruit subjects for our study and document my calls with them. All my predecessors have done this on paper, but I'd like to slowly move out of the dark ages and use some sort of software, but I'm sort of clueless as to the best way to go about it. Here's the circumstances:

- because of privacy regulations, everything must be used with Cryptainer

- we've already got all the info except the notes from what happened during the calls in Paradox, and everything also on paper. The info I need to record seems too extensive to just make another field in Paradox, but not having to maintain addresses in both Paradox and another program would be nice, but not essential.

- the fields I need are pretty simple: an ID #, contact info, family relationships, and portions of the study already/yet to be completed, and a free entry field for notes from all the previous phone calls.

I know Excel would work ok, but is there something better? If the best solution isn't free, it might be very difficult to get funding to buy the software, but I'd try.

posted by slow graffiti to technology (5 comments total)

In what areas do you find working with Excel lacking?
posted by geoff. at 12:03 PM on July 7

Also, if it's not obvious, the most important thing is being able to sort to see an easy-to-scan list of people who have not been called since a certain date or by missing tests.
posted by slow graffiti at 12:03 PM on July 7

I can't think of anything that would be easier than Excel for this type of list.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 12:57 PM on July 7

Is this not the sort of thing CRMs were created for?

OK, so I hate Sugar, but there must be a Sugar / Highrise / free something out there you can use. Realistically, if all you need is client entry and contact tracking and a view of aged contacts by date or whatever, even the nightmare that is Sugar would be OK because you don't have to deal with the morass of advanced features.

Whatever - a simple CRM is what you need. For very simple needs like yours I'd be inclined to roll my own with Access so that you can dictate the screens you need and other people who don't like doing data entry into cells (ala Excel) can use it too, but there are loads out there if that's what you want.
posted by DarlingBri at 2:11 PM on July 7

You want an additional table in paradox: subject_id, call_time, call_reason, call_resolution. Or whatever. The subject_id key links back to the existing table, which contains subject name, address and phone number.
posted by orthogonality at 5:08 PM on July 7