You can use it like a business card file to store and retrieve customer information, or run your entire business with one program.
That list of associates in California you took hours to generate from a card file? FileMaker Pro can do in less than a second what it would take hours to do on physical cards.įigure 1. FileMaker Pro lets you do just about anything with the information you give it. The program lets you organize the same information in numerous ways with ease-say, by name or by state.
It contains lots of information, like addresses, Zip codes, and phone numbers, and it organizes that info in useful ways (see Figure 1 for an example). At heart, a digital database isn’t much different from one collected on business cards. Digital databases help you avoid that kind of tedium.įileMaker Pro helps you build a database so you can store information and then see that information the way you need to see it. What if you want to get a list of all your associates in California? Your card file isn’t organized by state, so you have to flip through every card, one by one, to create a list. Such physical databases have major limitations compared with their digital cousins. You can find any person’s card because you know where in the alphabet to look, even though there may be thousands of cards to look through.
Image a business card file (yep, that’s also a database) that organizes information about people alphabetically by name. The purpose of any database is to organize information so you can find what you’re looking for quickly and easily.
In fact, if you look up the word “database” in a dictionary (which is a database, too), you’ll find that a database is just a collection of information, or data. But databases have been around much longer than computers-a phone book, a cookbook, and an encyclopedia are all databases.
It calls to mind images of software engineering degrees and pocket protectors.
We’ll have a full hands-on review of FileMaker Pro 14 and Go 14 soon.The word “database” can be alarming. Launch Center is cross-platform, running on FileMaker Pro 14 on Mac and Windows, FileMaker Go on iPad and iPhone, and in web browsers through WebDirect. Users can organize solutions, personalize the look, and launch solutions with a click or tap.
The company has also added a new Launch Center that provides an app-like user interface complete with colorful icons. The same interactivity that’s available on the desktop app also shows up in desktop and tablet web browsers thanks to the improved FileMaker WebDirect.
FileMaker Pro 14 and FileMaker Pro 14 Advanced provide design tools that can be used by both casual users and professional developers to create business processes that run on all devices, even if they’ve never designed a solution previously. The FileMaker Go 14 app now has a new interface allowing screen orientation locking, providing enhanced signature capture, and control of audio and video playback. The tool lets users and developers create business processes that are accessible from web browsers, desktop computers (both Windows and Mac), and mobile devices. The single app has grown into a powerful and programmable relational database management system with a server front-end for workgroups, an iOS app known as FileMaker Go, and a tool called FileMaker WebDirect to create web-centric solutions.Īll of the components of FIleMaker Pro have been updated in FileMaker Pro 14. Today, FileMaker has millions of users, a vibrant user community, a Business Alliance with more than 1,200 member businesses that support and develop with FileMaker Pro, and a Made for FileMaker site where hundreds of third-party solutions developed with FileMaker can be purchases. Despite that limitation, it was popular for a number of use cases and really took off. When it first launched, FileMaker was a single-user flat-file database system. Fast-forward to 2015, and the company that makes FileMaker is 30 years old, a subsidiary of Apple, and has just released the newest version of the platform, FileMaker Pro 14. It was called FileMaker, and soon became a necessary purchase for any and all businesses that were using the Mac. Suddenly it was possible for anyone to create easy-to-use, point-and-click database solutions, so the app took off. Back in 1985, a graphical flat-file database application made its debut on the fledgling Macintosh platform and really rocked the world.