Productivity solutions guide
http://www.macworld.co.uk/filemaker
One thing that you can say about FileMaker: it plays well with others. If you’re dealing with data from other sources, FileMaker works with all common file formats. Chief among these is data saved into an Excel spreadsheet.
Getting data into FileMaker is straightforward. Make sure that the layout you’re in is linked to the table you want to import the data into, choose File
Import RecordsFile, and select the file containing the data you want to bring into the table. By matching data items in the left column with table fields in the right column, you can decide which bits of data to bring into which fields in the FileMaker table. You can also specify how the data is brought in: should it be used to create new records, or should it be used to update existing data in the current found set?
Once you’ve selected the options and clicked Import, FileMaker brings in the data, changing the current found set to match those records that have either just been imported, or the records that you’ve tried to update: it also lets you know how succesful you’ve been—how many records have been added or updated.
FileMaker can also provide file data files to other applications via the Export function. It’s just the reverse of the import function. Find just the records you want to export, choose FileExport Records, and then select which fields you want to export to the file. And yes, you can save it as an Excel spreadsheet.
1. Here’s the pricing data for our company’s product line which we’re going to use as the basis for a sales database. We could write a FileMaker database and import the data into it, but FileMaker can do the work for us. Choose FileOpen, select Excel Files from the pop-up menu, and select the Excel file and click Open.
2. You’re then asked which worksheet to import data from. Select the sheet and click Continue. Next, FileMaker wants to know if the first row contains actual data (or as in our case) field names. Click OK, and FileMaker goes away and creates a new database file with one table for the data and two automatic layouts.
3. Here’s one of the two automatic layouts: a list view, mimicing the original Excel sheet. Click-&-drag column names around to reorder the columns, or click on an individual column name to sort the data by that column. The other automatic layout, Layout#1, is a form view for data entry.
4. But what happens next month? Here, we’re importing head office’s price data for December, using it to update the prices of those records in the current found set. If there are any new products, which therefore can’t be in the found set, they’ll be added as new records.
