Flat to Related, Nightmare Mode

[clchildress]

Where I work, a particular person has had FMP thrown at them without any training and expected to make a working database that deals with patient care info. This person is a *nurse,* completely untrained in computers. As a result of certain parties believing that she must have a telepathic link to FMP instructors because hey she's a nurse, the entire database is flat. Instead of having separate tables for patient info and records, everything is just heaped together as a listing of patient care incidents. This has been going on for about 5 years. Now, I'm supposed to jump in and separate patient info from patient records. We have 9500+ records. As it stands, I get to go through all 9500+ (and growing daily) records, manually enter the patient info into the appropriate table, and then create records with the appropriate info and patient linked to it. This is a whole lot of manual data entry that I'd prefer to avoid. I have tried different ways of importing the data but haven't found anything that actually works. I'm not exactly totally new to FMP, but I'm certainly no pro and I don't really know any scripting yet. Any help whatsoever would be tremendously appreciated. Thanks!

Edit: Please ignore the obvious mean nature of this message, and try to read through to the meat of the question. I apologize for barking sarcasm on the forums.

Edited December 12, 2007 by Guest

[David Jondreau]

A lowly nurse built a FM system that was "fairly functional" for 5 years? How can that be? (sorry can't find the "steaming sarcasm smilie" at the moment.)

And now you are charged with the database, but are fairly new to relational databases and don't know anything about scripting?

Maybe you should advocate the hiring of an FM professional.

[Ted S]

I agree with DJ here. This is not just some home-brewed database for tracking a personal music collection, it sounds like it houses very important information that shouldn't get lost or messed-up. It probably is very wise to find somebody who is very well versed in FM databases to help you out.

The problems could go beyond what you have seen. For instance is the data being backed-up regularly?

[clchildress]

My apologies; I should know better than to post when I'm in a sarcastic/caustic mood.

There is/was no blame on the nurse; she has done a very fine job, being given what she was and having to run with it. I'm certainly no pro but I know my way around FMP much better than she and I was trying to help a co-worker swamped with too many jobs.

Unfortunately hiring a pro is out of the question.

As I originally thought I will just bite the bullet and manually import (copy/paste) the data. Not fun, but effective. I have other jobs here that keep me very busy and learning FMP has been a side job, not a priority. Hopefully this will be a one-time affair.

However if anyone has a neat trick that might help the job go a little faster, I'm all ears!!

edit: in response to above, yes the data is regularly backed up, and yes it carries a vast amount of very important and sensitive information. I didn't want to try learning scripting with this database really, but was trying to find a solution that didn't involve manual copy/paste work. Looking forward, it's probably not bad that I'm touching each and every record as I have already caught a large number of mistakes that have since been corrected.

Edited December 12, 2007 by Guest