I did data entry for a job. In my experience, the numpad was considerably faster and accurate. It has been a long time, but I recall it cutting down entry time by ~5-6x (yes, I finished my daily quota in about an hour or two, instead of all day). The advantage was being able to use multiple fingers comfortably, without looking (there is a nice nub on most numpads) and leaving a hand free for letters/tabs. But like anything, I'm sure there are people that would have a different experience.

Interesting, though data entry feels like something that should have been automated (even if source is paper).

You'd be amazed how much cheaper it is to have a human do it than pay for automation. But also, law/contract required the data to be accurate (so there were 3 people, at minimum, entering the exact same data and records would be flagged if any of the 3 did not match). OCR, at the time (and even now), is highly unreliable with human handwriting. Not that I disagree with your statement, automation would have been nice. And though I like to think we want humans doing higher-level things, a lot of the people there were happy to get decent pay and not have to think for their day job.

I haven't had a full keyboard with a numpad in years, but if you ever worked in any data entry job in your career and learned to properly touch type on the numpad it is wildly faster than touch typing with the regular keyboard and needing to use two hands to reach all of the numbers.

I suspect the utility of a numpad is increased while the off center problems are decreased for touchtypers which is why there is such a divide.

> I suspect the utility of a numpad is increased while the off center problems are decreased for touchtypers which is why there is such a divide.

Ah? I would have thought the opposite. I cannot touch-type at all (and you could promise me a million dollars reward, I still wouldn't manage), nevertheless there is one part of the keyboard I can use without looking, and it is the numpad. Possibly because it is a limited area with a limited number of keys, and the numbers are placed in a "logical" order (compared to letters on the main part of a keyboard).

I am bad at entering numbers on the top row, a I am forced to do on most laptops (and unfortunately, I personally find the pseudo-numpad, which requires using the Fn key or similar, utterly unusable; I never could get used to it).