A Digital 10-Key Calculator that mirrors real-life

What 10 Key speed do you need for a data entry job?

The world runs on data?

Much of the data entry industry still relies on the hands, eyes, and fingers of data entry operators. In just about every data processing ecosystem, from the smallest home business to the largest multinational corporation, a individuals are entering data. The individual's 10 Key speed can have a direct impact on the efficiency and power of the overall data processing system they are part of.

Traditional Data Entry Style and Speed

Data entry can mean a lot of things, from transcription of text to court reporting to entering values into a spreadsheet. 

In the past, Data Entry Speed was measured in Words per Minute (WPM) and was generally used to describe typing speed on a traditional QWERTY-style keyboard. A professional typist would be expected to average about 80 words per minute to qualify for most professional jobs, although people with a measured WPM as low as 50 might be considered. 

Competitive Data Entry and Speed

In today's world, the concept of data entry speed has become complicated. With 10-key pads on keyboards, numeric data entry has split from text data entry. Numeric data entry has also created a separate metric for measuring data entry speed: Keystrokes per hour (KPH).

Numeric data entry using a 10-Key Pad is generally expected to be much faster, as no thought has to be put into the meaning or formatting of the text. 

Competitive speeds for numeric data entry are generally around 10,000 KPH and often as high as 12,000 KPH.

The Future of Data Entry and Speed

Scanning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies are poised to become accurate and reliable enough to supplant human operators. However, to date OCR software still introduces too many errors, especially when working with damaged hard copies. While the OCR algorithms are improving, there is still a ways to go so for now data entry is here to stay.