I hope this is the right place to post this...if not, I do apologize.

First of all, I'm a bit new to File Maker...I've have experience with some other databases, but I've never used file maker before.

The company I work for uses file maker, and I have something that I would like to do.

First of all, I have created a database in FM that has quite a few records. What I want to do is this:

I want to be able upload a file specifically, an excel file, then have FM search every part number in one column from that file against the data in the FM databse.

In other words..I want to upload a file into FM..FM will then take all the part numbers in one column of the excel file and compare it against the data in the FM databse.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Anyone know of a way to do that or any good documentation on how to accomplish that?

It doesn't have to be pretty, as I'll be the only one using this.

Import the Excel file into another table and then you can compare to the other table with a relationship.

I should of mentioned as well that both sets of data are slightly different from each other.

In other words,

The first database has a column that says "PN".

12345-678 <-- thats an example of one of thousands of numbers that might be in that column.

The Second Database would have basically the same data, but instead of the full number like the above number it might just be:

12345

There would be no dash...however I'm hoping to search the first database for 12345 and have 12345-678 returned in the results.

Would that still work the same way if I created the second DB with the other data and the compared them?

If that will work, is there a paper / help article on how to compare databases like that?

Thanks in advance.

You'd make a calculation field in the "import" table to return only the fist part of the part number (the bit before the dash) and use this in the relationship.