I am trying to attach other MS office files to tasks in a task manager database. However, I'm not sure if there is straight forward way to do this in filemaker if at all. Any suggestions??

If your'e in Windows, then create a contianer field, then Select the Insert-Object menu and Browse for the file to insert. Choose "display as Icon". You can either embed the file in Filemaker or link.

Now, to open the file, select the container field and double click. The file will open in its parent application.

As hard as you may find it to believe, its harder to do on a Mac. See the discussion in the Define Fields Is It Possible to Link or Store Documents. I put a reply in down about #7 - but its not "elegant".

At my company we have found that putting docutments actually in the database causes more problems than it solves. However what we do is put the files on a web server and use "open URL" script step with a URL calculated from a server location and docutment ID. We don't do this with editable office documents but we do it with .pdf's. I haven't tested but it very well could work with office docs.

We are about 50/50 mixed Mac/PC. We have MacOS9 & X.1 as well as WinNT4 & 2000. Our biggest stumbling block is always ensuring systems work with each OS consistently.

--phil