Smartsheet Automating Data Collection Through Mechanical Turk
Smartsheet has just launched their “Smartsourcing” product which allows you to automatically build data-collection tasks in a “Smartsheet” (a spreadsheet) and outsource them as HIT’s on Mechanical Turk. I just watched the demo video over at Smartsheet, and I have to say that the integration looks pretty slick.
The ability to outsource data collection and have it populate a formatted spreadsheet in near real-time is fairly impressive (speed will probably differ on attractiveness of the task). Often, the steps required to set up a MTurk task can take as long as the data collection itself, and afterwards you are left exporting to an unformatted Excel sheet. Making sure to name data-labels correctly, populating data fields to randomize among workers, and other tasks can further complicate things; judging from the demo video, Smartsheet seems to handle these parts of the process fairly easily.
Unfortunately, good service doesn’t come free, and using the Smartsourcing feature requires signing up for a paid-account as well as the Smartsourcing fee on top of that, so I didn’t get the chance to try it out, but I would be extremely curious to hear about anyone’s experience with the service if they do try it.
Sanjay, we're happy to spot you $10 to try the service without having to sign up for a paid account (which is possible for $9.95/month – so not that expensive to try out in reality). I'll send you an invitation directly from the Smartsheet service that will simply ask you to choose a password. You'll then be in app and good to go. Write whatever impressions you have from the experience. Best, – Brent Frei, Founder
pretty smooth,, too bad you have to pay ,, how much would it costs?? i can't wait to try it ,,you just can't resist curiosity,the demo video is sure a lot help to understand more about it,,thanks for the info's
Thanks a lot…. It's really a great article regarding smart sheet. But i can't understand that how you do this . I also try a lot to do like this but can't successful … can you help me…….!!!!!!!!!!!?
Thanks for the information, I kind of liked this!
Smartsheet functionality like integrated file uploading and discussions are indeed upgrades to a traditional spreadsheet, but fall short of the consolidated messaging, task and deadline tracking that I would expect to find in a project management application. For example, there doesn’t seem to be a way to view all tasks assigned to me across all of my project sheets.
Thanks
Very well written, thanks.
Robert.