digidana
FileMaker Pro 13 MacWorld Review ZDNet Review ITProPortal Review
Big software for your needs, but maybe worth having just to play. 329.00 US at Amazon. Probably a good idea to buy the Missing Manual when the edition for Pro 13 comes out. Others seem to rate the Pro 12 edition highly.
I remember this being a product of Claris back in original Mac days.
digidana, would you be able to put up a sample of your database? You could leave the fields in and just populate it with fake data. You could share it for free from Google Drive or Dropbox or Microsoft Onedrive through your Windows account, if you use any of those.
It sounds like what you want to do could very well be done in a simple Excel or free Google spreadsheet, skipping the complexity of a database altogether. It’s hard to say for sure without seeing the actual layout, though.
And yeah, I think you’d have to download the entire LibreOffice suite for base. It’s not very big though, only about 200 megs for the normal version and 100 megs for the portable version that doesn’t have to be installed.
And if you download the normal version, you don’t HAVE to install the other programs if Base is all you want.
This is more of an opinion answer, but MS Access kicked me around. I never could figure out how to do some very simple things in it. ZipperJJ said its interface is user-friendly, but, in my experience, it wasn’t…
I have installed MySQL (the free version) and…um…I can’t figure out how to do anything with it. It boggles me.
(This is really frustrating, as I was a Database Administrator for a large manufacturing corporation for nine years. We used the “Progress” database – similar to Oracle – and, damn, I could make that thing sing! I wish I’d bought a PC version when I had the chance!)
(Way, way back in the day, “Cornerstone” from Infocom was a very nice bit of product.)
I’m off to try Libreoffice!
This is why I say… Filemaker is probably the easiest and most user friendly relational database on the planet. The OP has been doing what they do for EIGHTEEN years.
Change is often good, but in this case if all they want to do is get back to work and not embark on a major learning experience, coughing up the $ for a newer version of filemaker and avoiding a ton of conversion and new interface headaches is probably the way to go. If you divide the 300 dollar upgrade cost over 18 years of use so far, that’s a pretty good deal.
However a quick look at their site reveals even that won’t be a completely straightforward conversion since the file format they are using is just so old. It has to be first opened in FMP 11 or earlier, then that converted file can be opened in the latest version (13). But they make the version 11 free trial still available for download just for this purpose.
It’s actually pretty cool that the 3.0 version, circa I think 1994 or so, has been happily chugging along all these years until Windows 7 finally did it in. At that rate version 13 should last well into Windows 2034.
Crazyhorse, agreed. I don’t have the cycles to blow on this (drag cause the new product with all this extras looks like fun) but there must be someway to export/import. I would be surprised if the old product could not export data in comma delimited format. (That was the norm, many moons ago.) From there you should be able to format to whatever you need, then import.
It could definitely export as delimited text, DBF, DIF, etc. But if they have any scripts or special layouts and buttons they made, etc. those won’t be preserved in any of those formats. But if they convert it directly all that should be preserved so it will work like it used to without any modifications.
I’m wondering what/if anything besides the data could be preserved after that length of time. Still, the new software has many new templates so rebuilding applications may not be that painful. Guess we’ll have to wait to see what the OP does. Again, looks like fun software.
The OP is a embroidery design digitizer, not a programmer… with ~ 15K of orders. I missed this:smack: (See post # 8 in this thread.)
Yeah, FMP-13 maybe just the way to go.
yeah, it would probably still be working, but it doesn’t work with 64-bit.
Systems Analyst / Programmer here, just trying to understand the requirements.
digidana, you say that you have ~15,000 orders.
Are those current orders that you are in the midst of fulfilling, or are they historical?
If they are historical, do you absolutely need to access them at an instance’s notice?
Why, exactly, do you need access to those old records? Government compliance?
You seem to be making the ~15,000 records a requirement, so I’m trying to ascertain if you absolutely need that functionality or if it is something that would be “nice to have”.
~ = ~ - ~ = ~ =
From my experience, pretty much any database manager (MySQL, SQL Express, MS Access, whatever) is going to appear to be “overkill” for your needs, but it really won’t be. Database software has to be complex enough to do the complex things that people need database software for, even if all you need it to do is some simple storage/access.
Think of it like a car. Even though you might only drive your car to the store and back on weekends by yourself, your car is probably perfectly capable of driving across the country with at least one passenger and possibly two.
If you can download and install LibreOffice then running currently installed software in XP mode isn’t over your head. And if it works it wont cost you anything as well as being a lot easier than converting your data and forms to Access or LibreOffice.
But it depends on what version on Win 7 you have. It’s only available for Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise editions.
The procedure below assumes you have the correct version of Win 7 and that XP mode is already installed.
If it’s not installed you will need to download and install it - detailed instructions can be found here: Install Windows XP Mode in Windows 7
Steps:
[ol]
[li]Find the executable file for Filemaker and then right click on it[/li][li]Select the Compatibility tab[/li][li]Check the option for Run this program in compatibility mode for[/li][li]Select Windows XP from the drop down list [/li][li]Click the OK button[/li][/ol]