Hi there,

I am exploring the possibilities of replacing a spreadsheet for data gathering. In this sheet, that consists of 20 different tabs, all kinds of (technical) information is gathered by means of question and responses in all kinds of forms.

I have a 1 on n relation ship with parties, where the parties have a team of different people providing and working of gathering data and entering currently in the spreadsheet. Meanwhile I also add bits and pieces of information. This whole process can take several weeks, where the data has to be altered or data added. So emphesis here is working together confidential and as a team.

Surely the various parties may not see other data sets of other parties for security and GDPR reasons. The set of forms (tabs of the spread sheet so to speak) will be used over and over again for new parties.

Do I make sense please?

Thanks for any assistance in understanding.

Are you using an online spreadsheet? Or how is access to the spreadsheet organized?
Depending on what "spreadsheet" means technically, the use of LimeSurvey might be not improving your case. Why are you looking for a different solution? What is the biggest painpoint with the spreadsheet?

Thanks for the response.

1. Online spreadsheet? -> No (Excel file)
2. Spreadsheet access now by means of sending copies over email back and forth, no revision control of entered data
3. Spreadsheet is used for it easy to catch data per row or column, basically it is used as a survey document to capture tech data. No real spreadsheet functionality is used
4. Painpoint: Spreadsheet is old school, no jazzy and dull to use. Als export via API or through JSON etc is more appropriate. Spreadsheet now is about 26 tabs, hard to manage
5. See 4. Number inventories is increasing and a spreadsheet today is not the right tool

Ideally the 'survey' is a technical questionair and inventory list of data, passwords, IP numbers, names, emails etc etc 

There is me and a team of co-workers (team A) and a 'client' with a number of team members (Team . Both team A and B should have free access to the survey and adjust entered data along the way, so basically never close. Every team B data should be secure and ONLY accessible by Team A and Team B. Team B can work on different suveys thus working with multiple team B's each with their own set of data.

Obviously we can analyze the survey data much better then a spreadsheet.

Thanks for you consideration!

I would not use LimeSurvey for that job. I would try to use a collaboration tool with form feature. Perhaps you take a look at Nextcloud. That way you have a strong user/permission access system and can provide different files to add and share.
You can add simple forms as well.

While LimeSurvey can capture data, users cannot log into the survey as a taker. You would share tokens to edit the same response set. But you wouldn't be able to have revisions or at least know which person edited the response set.

Capturing passwords via Excelfiles seems to be more dangrous than capturing via LimeSurvey, but I still wouldn't want to have them in a tokenbased survey.

But let's see what others think.

I agree with jelo. I don't think that Limesurvey will be the best tool for your use case. You can probably use it at least for parts of what you want to do, but this part will be probably tricky:

Both team A and B should have free access to the survey and adjust entered data along the way, so basically never close.

From what I understand here, you would want to go back to already entered datasets and update/correct/change them. Here is where I think Limesurvey is not the tool for the job, because as a survey tool it was created to collect data from different people, generally once. You might be able to achieve a way of updating datasets afterwards, but it will not be a very straight forward process.