FileMaker Pro 10
Connecting state and local government leaders
FileMaker Pro 10 also allows up to 999 users to simultaneously connect to its databases, which is four times the number of earlier versions.
Ease of use: A+
Features: A
Versatility: A
Value: B+
Price: $299
Pros: Very easy to use, changing fields a breeze
Cons: A little expensive
Not long after graduation, fresh-faced and filled with hope, I got a job as a dBase III Plus database programmer. Facing that unwieldy software every morning, I soon developed a bitter view of databases: huge, bleak, delimited fields of despair.
So what a nice surprise to take FileMaker Pro 10 for a spin. Can databases have changed so much since the 1980s? Compared to my dBase days, FileMaker Pro 10 was almost fun.
FileMaker Pro 10 has a very browser-y look, with a tool bar at the top. Browse is the operative word here. You browse through these records, you don’t pore over them. There’s no sense of white-collar drudgery here because you’re just browsing, like it’s Saturday afternoon in the bookstore.
It’s also easy to sort and modify records. Back in my dBase days, I couldn’t modify anything. Fields were impossible to alter once they were set up.
FileMaker installed easily on a standard 1.8 GHz Dell Pentium 4 desktop PC with 256M of RAM running Windows XP. A start-up screen gives you three choices:
- Create an empty database.
- Create a database from an existing Microsoft Excel file or text file.
- Create a database using one of 30 prepackaged templates, called “starter solutions.” These ranged from asset management and contact lists to recipes.
I used FileMaker to convert my Excel holiday gift list, a simple affair of less than 20 names. Fields included gift description, estimated cost, actual cost and a field I checked off when I had bought the gift. FileMaker databases in other environments hold millions of records, so this was a microcosm of its capabilities.
FileMaker handily converted the list, even performing the financial calculations out to 13 decimals, a bit too precise for my purposes, but definitely valuable to bean counters.
FileMaker had a little trouble translating the fonts. For the “gift completed” field in Excel, I had marked a smiley face by typing a j in the Wingdings font. FileMaker converted this back to a regular j, a minor glitch.
This spurred another reminiscence of my sentence in dBase hell. One time I had to import an address database of 40,000 names from a mainframe into dBase. The fields all had to be delimited by commas. I didn’t know that area codes got a separate field and neglected to delimit that field with commas. All 40,000 phone numbers were exported off kilter and had to be redone by hand, a process that took several weekends.
In this case, I gleefully changed the j’s in FileMaker back to smiley faces in about two seconds.
Now I could sort and browse through my gift list easily. I used the Find Mode to create a subset of people whose gifts cost more than $50. I set an operator of “greater than or equal to” for a particular field, in this case field 6, “actual gift cost,” and inserted 50.
I was a little surprised to see that only three people were on this list, but you’ll be glad to know that one of them was Mom. FileMaker Pro 10 also works with the company’s personal database, Bento 2. It lets you save files as PDF or Excel files, and you can also send e-mail directly from FileMaker.
Unlike previous versions, FileMaker Pro 10 lets you make changes right from Browse Mode that take effect instantly. With earlier versions, you had to switch to Find Mode to locate records you wanted to change and then re-run your reports.
Also new in this version of FileMaker Pro are script triggers that let you set a trigger to perform an action, such as spell checking. Similar to a spreadsheet macro, a script trigger will run based on timing or whenever a user takes a specified action such as clicking in a field or exiting a viewing mode.
FileMaker is friendly, not intimidating, but it can hold all the records you want to stuff into it. FileMaker Pro 10 also allows up to 999 users to simultaneously connect to its databases, which is four times the number of earlier versions.
You just get the sense that somebody put a lot of thought and care into FileMaker. You can sort recipes in the recipe database by the number of servings. The event management database can be customized with photos, contacts, tasks, guests, agendas, gifts, maps, venues and notes. Friendly and intuitive, FileMaker Pro 10 makes databases, if not exactly fun, much easier to like.
FileMaker, 800-325-2747, www.filemaker.com
NEXT STORY: Wyatt's Test Article