[Natsu]

Would it really have taken longer to automate it, then feed in the data than to do it by hand?

I ask because I have, when presented with similar tasks, spent the time learning how to do it in WSH (sendkey), doing it, then doing more productive things while the script ran.

[IgorPartola]

So without going into too much detail, yes it would have taken longer. The reason is that we were solving quite a few non-trivial problems in terms of updating geographic road data. Just as an example, a small part of the data entry tools ended up being a road router similar to the one provided by Google Maps, but tuned to our use case. This tuning took quite a bit of work. Another piece was splitting the graph of all roads at each intersection. The algorithm here was simple enough but figuring that this was the right solution took a while.

[edoloughlin]

There's an XKCD for that: http://www.xkcd.com/1319/