Difficulty Factor

[REGGIE MAGER]

Good morning, everyone,

After working all day on my database I have come to several conclusions. First off, I appreciate the help that everyone offers on this site. Without it I think I would be totally lost. I come from using Lotus Approach. Which is still the database that I use most often. The main reason I try to use Filemaker is if I want to distribute my finished product. Something that Approach sadly doesn't support. No runtime version. I read many nice articles about FileMaker and it's ease of use. Well, here's what I find. In most everyday situations I find it to be on an ease of use par with Approach. What really annoys me is the simple things are made SO difficult. For example: In Approach if I want a field to display a telephone number, I click on # in the properties box and then choose Telephone. Simple. If I want a checkbox to display as onn and off I click on CHECKBOX and then choose my values as 1 and 0. Simple. I hate having to do all these workarounds for simple tasks. It seems that FileMaker has been around long enough (and I see that I'm not the only one that has problems with these features) that they would whave implemented these features in their program. And my biggest gripe of all is the fact that value lists can only be set on one previous field. I se SO many people asking for this feature and yet with every new version of FileMaker, nothing is implemented. Do they not care about user input? Yes, I agree that this is much easier to learn to use than Access, but there are many improvements that could be made to make it easier for the average database user to use.

I'm sorry for ranting, but I think that MANY of us appreciate the new features they add to updated versions, but how about getting back to basics and making some of these improvements for us non-experts who just want to build a basic database. Thanks for your listening ears.

[John Mark Osborne]

FileMaker has chosen to offer deep features which sometimes makes simple things a little bit harder. On the other hand, it also allows for combinations of features that Approach doesn't have. In other words, you can accomplish a lot more variations with FileMaker than with Approach. For example, because FileMaker offers the ability to auto-enter calculations rather than provide a phone format feature, you can write a formula to format a phone number, social security number, credit card number and other kind of value you can think of. While I don't totally disagree with your comments, I wonder what FileMaker would look like if they offered a menu item for every possible feature rather than providing less features that can be varied depending on the scenario.

[REGGIE MAGER]

I agree with what you're saying, but what would be so bad about catering to the more inexperienced database users as well as the more advanced? Why not offer the easier features and still have the advanced users be able to do things the way that they're doing them now? I don't believe that that would detract from the program, but make it a better product. For those that are good and experienced at writing formulas, nothing would change. For those that don't use the program 8 hours a day it would be a godsend! Everybody would be happy! LOL

[John Mark Osborne]

Ahhhh... you've hit the nail on the head. There have been rumors going around since FileMaker Pro 3.0 came out that there might be a FileMaker "light" some day. Some people argued it should be FileMaker Pro 2.0 as the light version. But, much time has passed since then.

Right now, FileMaker, Inc. is indeed trying to do exactly what you say with their FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Advanced. Whether there is enough of a difference between the two is where the debate is found.

Maybe some day there will be two distinctly different versions of the program. Maybe three versions?!?

[Genx]

Hi John,

I believe there are rumours floating around about a third distinct version of FileMaker at this stage, but i believe that it will only run FileMaker files and allow it to interact with server a thin client so to speak -- No actual building of the files would be allowed.

As the articles say, this is something the competitors have been allowing for years.