What is the best competitor to Access?

[Dr Ash]

Hey people, need a little help if you have the time. I have to replace Microshaft Access here at my work. Does FileMaker 5 read these files?: If not what can?

Can anyone answer this questions?

Cheers from the Doc

[Vaughan]

Prolly nothing can "read the files" if by that you mean open the databses and have all the layouts, macros etc work.

The best you can do is export *the data* from Access, create a database in the other program that reproduces the functionality, then import the data into it.

Yeah, it's a lot of work.

[TimGFoley]

I recently did a fair amount of attempting to convert from MS Access to FileMaker.

Simpliest method was to export my database tables to Excel on the PC and then on the Mac export the Excel spreadsheet to Tab Delimited format. Once its in Tab Del, its a easy import into any database program and FileMaker had no problem at all with it. Imported all my tables. Course you won't get any of the code you've written for your database, that is a major re-write.

I imagine I could have just exported my Access tables directly from Access to Tab Delimited but I wanted to leave nothing to chance and Excel is perfectly cross platform compatbile.

However, I've been finding FileMaker far too limited in terms of scripting and coding. Access you can put VB code anywhere and everywhere but with FileMaker it seems to rely to much on manually run scripts or AppleScripts.

I've been using MySQL for the web backend and thats been quite handy so far but of course it doesn't have a fancy front end like Access or FileMaker.

Going to check out 4D next I guess or try to get a copy of FileMaker Developer and see if its a little more powerfull.

All in all, I hate to admit it but I haven't found a true competitor to Access on the Mac yet in terms of flexibility but I'll keep plodding.