I am thinking of purchasing FM11 pro but have a couple of issues 1st.

I have about 40k files in excel format, which I would like to import to FM. Issue 1: lets say SOMETIMES cell A1 has "Name" and cell A2 has "Jim" thenA3 has"address". OTHER TIMES "Name" will appear in cell B6 and Cell B7 has "jim" and B8 has "james" b/c he goes by 2 names. Then B9 has"address".

My objective is to import the just the cells with Jim and or James.

Also in this file is ie. cell E8 contains "ID" and E9 is "***767***" I just want the ID to be imported as 767 less the asterisks.

I am not sure whether to do this editing in excel(scripts) or if FM has these functions built in.

thank you

PS wouldve attached an example spreadsheet but it says I can't upload this kind of file.

Filemaker imports an Excel sheet as a table - every row will be one record, and every column will be mapped into one field. Also, data will be imported "as is" - though you can manipulate it later using scripts, or - to some extent - during the import using auto-entered calculations.