I'm sorry you feel that way about Access. Having used Access for almost 20
years, I found Filemaker seriously wanting.
The code aspect of Access is hugely powerful, if a significant learning
curve.
However, even without code, it was much easier to set up relationships in
Access, and forms were much easier to create when using parent/child
relationships.
Filemake does have an easier user interface, but when the database gets
serious, I would use Access anytime.
Access Text data types are limited to 255 characters: Memo to 64,000+
characters.
Yes/No is a boolean type, which may have a 3rd state - not set.
Binary I have not used...
The Filemaker documentation tool is indeed superior.
However, field lists are not difficult to obtain, but it takes an
understanding that you need to turn System Objects on: then the metadata
tables are shown, and they can give you all the system/database data that
you need.
And you can do whatever you want with queries against the tables.
Not at all obvious, but really powerful once you find it.
And, of course, you can use your own SQL in Access whenever you want...
Ron
From: FileMaker Pro Discussions [mailto:
[hidden email]] On
Behalf Of Richard S. Russell
Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2009 6:46 PM
To:
[hidden email]
Subject: Re: Exporting from Access
On 2009 Oct 15, at 14:58, Ron Carr wrote:
If you use Excel 2007 64K record limit disappears.
I agree .dbf format is best.
Using Excel some formats can change, like zip codes can become numeric and
lose leading zero, if your zips have one: I am in Northeast where they are
all leading zeroes.
What version of Access? I can give you detail instructions.
Some ancient thing, circa 2000, I think. It didn't say anything about DBF as
an export option, but it DID give me 5 different flavors of Paradox. I
settled for tab-delimited text, which is my preference, anyway. Now it
remains to be seen if everything imports OK into FMP. I was not previously
acquainted with Access's "Yes/No", "Binary", and "Memo" data types, so we'll
see how they turn out. At this point, I'm just doing a test import, so I
expect to be learning a few new things shortly.
The good news is that whoever designed the Access database obviously had no
sense at all of how relationality worked, so there are only 3 tables worth
mentioning, they're not linked to each other, and even the largest of them
has only about 25 fields and 5000 records, so if necessary I could do a lot
of hand-adjusting (not that I WANT to, of course, but it's not outside the
realm of possibility).
I suppose it's possible that Microsoft has improved this piece of crap thru
the subsequent years, but I wasn't able to get it to do something as
elementary as printing me out a field list. Sheesh.
