- Platform: Mac OS 9 and below
- Media: CD-ROM
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Product Description
Amazon.com Product Description
FileMaker Pro 5 brings instant productivity to business workgroups, helping you manage, organize, and share important information with colleagues over your intranet. With either Windows or Macintosh, you can create sophisticated reports and forms to share over a network with just one click. Building on its acclaimed Instant Web Publishing capabilities, FileMaker Pro 5 takes database Web publishing to new levels, allowing users to automatically render database layouts on their intranet--it's that easy. A completely new interface, which complements the look and feel of Microsoft Office, enables users who are familiar with Microsoft Office compatible products to quickly locate many common menu choices.
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The last version of FileMaker Pro was a bit of a disappointment for longtime fans of this lovably approachable database - it seemed as if all the developers' energy had gone into the (admittedly clever) Web publishing features, while the rest of the program was more or less ignored. Version 5.0, thankfully, is a far more comprehensive update that makes useful improvements to every one of FileMaker's features. For first-time users, it remains a delightful tool that we recommend without reservation. But this time, owners of previous versions also have reason to celebrate. The first thing you'll notice about FileMaker Pro is that the application's interface has been remodeled to make it more comprehensible to new users. We can take or leave the Microsoft Office-style toolbar, but the menu reorganization is long overdue - what was Delete Record doing in the Mode menu all those years, anyway? Throw in resizeable dialog boxes, improved contextual menus, and support for Apple's newfangled Navigation Services' open-and-save dialogs, and you have the model of a well-designed Mac application.
Another bonus for users is an ingenious Layout/Report Assistant. Rather than cramming data into pre-fab templates, this handy step-by-step assistant walks you through the complex process of building grouped reports with fancy headers, footers, and summary fields - a tricky task even for experienced FileMaker users. You can select from a number of layout themes - combinations of colors, fonts, and graphic elements that lend a consistent style to your database. Themes are also used by the improved, style-savvy Web Companion, so your layouts keep their look and feel in a Web browser.
Database authors will also welcome FileMaker Pro's new value list options. You can reuse value lists from other databases, and do some very cool stuff using value lists based on database fields. But heads up - older FileMaker databases will need updating to the new file format. In other layout news, you can apply crude engraving, embossing and drop shadow effects to fields. There's also a View As Table option, which displays your layout in a multicolumn spreadsheet format; it's not very pretty, but it's a lot less hassle than creating a columnar layout on the spur of the moment.
Rounding out the list of improvements are a slew of other long-awaited tweaks, including the ability to import scripts from other databases and a Web-safe color palette. There's even a primitive data-updating feature you can use to synchronize databases, though it's complicated and poses a high risk of inadvertently mangling data. We hope this will be further streamlined in future releases.
There's only one cloud on the horizon. As of version 5.0, the FileMaker product line is splitting into four separate products - this is the cheapest and the first to arrive. As the low end of the database line, the basic Pro now has a ten-user limit for both network and Web access - and to prove it's serious, FileMaker Inc.'s license prohibits the use of CGIs and Web gateways like Blue World's Lasso that could be used to circumvent this restriction. If you need to serve more than 10 users, you'll have to hold out for the $999 FileMaker Pro Unlimited, due later this year. For small-time databasers, however, FileMaker Pro 5.0 is a solid revision that further boosts the program's already superb flexibility and ease of use. -- Mark Simmons
Good News: Really useful layout assistant. Web-published databases look a lot better. New value list options are boss.
Bad News: Data updating feature needs work. Ten-user access limit.
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