FilemakerPro11
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FileMaker releases free business productivity kit, 30-day trial
Filemaker Pro 11 was released earlier this year with a slew of new features, including native charting, recurring imports and "snapshot link," which lets you share and edit a found set of records with a remote colleague. Today, Filemaker has upped the ante by releasing a free Business Productivity Kit and 30-day free trial of Filemaker Pro 11. The kit is a collection of ready-to-use templates for business owners who don't have the time or inclination to build a system for themselves, but want to get right to work. It includes solutions for tracking customer and vendor contacts, sales, product information, invoicing and shipping. Of course, if you want to get in and fiddle with the solutions, that's no problem. You can enter layout mode, tinker with scripts, etc. So not only are they useful out of the gate, but the templates also offer an opportunity to see how a well-made solution is put together. There's both a Standard Edition of the productivity kit (for companies selling goods) and Service Edition (for companies providing services) available. Both require Filemaker Pro 11. If you don't have it, don't worry. The kit includes a 30 day trial. Have fun and get to work!
FileMaker 11 now available with charting, reporting improvements
Apple subsidiary FileMaker has been busy; the flagship database app grows by another leap today with the release of version 11. We were lucky enough to get a pre-release demo at Macworld Expo in February and were duly impressed. As someone who's been using FileMaker since version 6, I'm thrilled with some of the additions to this update; let's get to it. Launch Right off the bat, the introduction screen is new (after the splash screen "wobbles" into view). It's wider with more options, like a link to the online resource center. There you'll find video tutorials, starter solutions (more on that later) and access to consultants. They're all extremely useful and aimed at users and developers alike. Charts The big news starts with built-in support for charts. For years, developers and users have employed plug-ins and other 3rd-party solutions to get charting done, or they simply exported data to Excel. Now those extra efforts may be a thing of the past. As you would imagine, adding a chart is super easy. While in layout mode, use the new chart tool to drag out a charting area. From there, the setup screen appears. This is a real pleasure to use. You can select between a bar graph (horizontal or vertical), line chart, area or pie. Give your chart a name, or base its name on a field or calculation. Likewise, the X and Y axis can be labeled with your own titles or a field or calculation. If you've got more than one Y axis variable (for example, number of occurrences and procedure duration) adding each is as simple as a click. Finally, you can pull data from a found set, the current record only, or from related records -- which is awesome. Now it gets fun. Click "Format Chart" to style all aspects of your chart. Select your color palette (options are presented as cute color samples), fonts, backgrounds and axis labels plus scale minimums and maximums. It's full-featured and nearly everything I wanted when I was stuck routinely exporting data to Excel just to make charts with version 6. In my testing this was simple and effective. The only thing missing for me is a scatter plot option, but a line chart could do the job in a pinch. %Gallery-87784%
