I have a friend that use Filemaker extensively in his business. He wants to take on a new client, but they use MSAccess. He asked me to see if I could find a way that he could do business with this company. Import/Export Filemaker, Access, etc.

Is there any way that he can get Access files into Filemaker. He uses a Mac.

Thanks

Hi:

You can, but it's extensive.

Option 1: Manual export/import

You manually export records from the Access tables and import into FM. The info is only as current as the last import

Option 2: Use SQL queries

Set up the FileMaker file to exchange info using sql statements. You will have to set up an ODBC data source and construct your queries and all that stuff.

Option 3: Migrate to FileMaker

There is nothing that Access can do that FM can't. Except Access is a true relational database system, where multiple data tables can be stored in one file. FM's "tables" are the files themselves.

Ken

Option 3

Multiple FM files have never bothered me in the least. The biggest (or perhaps I should say 'only') advantage that I found with Access was real event triggers. (Conditional formats are nice too, but not a big deal.) FM 7 really must include event triggers.

Having said that, I'd never go back to Access for another project. It takes forever to set up the simplest operations, and it gets to be very very slow once you have more than a few objects on a form.

So I'd opt for option 3 also, but that's too easy an answer. Option 1 has its limitations, I'm sure you'll admit. So go with option 2. Be warned that the FM ODBC driver is way way too slow in my experience.

Dan

If it is just question of interfacing between those two animals, maybe Import/Export of data will be OK if real-time processing is not required.