Comments on: FileMaker Gets Bento

By: Gisela Drayton

Gisela Drayton — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:17:41 +0000

Bento is sooo limited in Printing, it is totally worthless for me. It automaticaly imported my Address Book. When I tried to print from it, I couldn’t. I was on a trial version, and if I recall, I could make mailing labels, but so 1000 ther programs. I wanted to be able to print some labels other than the typical address labels and I couldn’t. I had come up with some other ideas regarding modifying labels, but by that the trial run had run out and I was no longer able do download it. So I quit.

By: DaveMacG

DaveMacG — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:27:03 +0000

I have been banging on FM Pro6 for years and thought that Bento would really be a leap in contact management software … but after some poking around I will stick to my OSX Tiger FM pro 6.

The most valuable function I need in project & contact management is relational email correspondence tracking …ie, with a click of a button
I can see the lists of email correspondences to and from a particular person/company/phone number etc. This I have laboriously coded with my own scripts and 3rd party ‘Mail to Filemaker Importer’ application.

I find it unbelievable that Bento and all other pro-sumer data base applications(AFAIK) don’t knit seamlessly with mail programs.

Am I alone here?

But I do love my local teriyaki bento box

By: Geoff Coffey

Geoff Coffey — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:27:43 +0000

@dave: My understanding is that Bento is designed to process CSV files from Excel. I don’t remember all the details, but the handling of quotes is not “standardized” in CSV (which is not an actual standard at all, but rather a de facto standard, I believe).

Anyway, handling quotes in CSVs is a common problem for anyone who has ever tried to work with both Excel and other applications.

You might try exporting from FileMaker as a tab-delimited file, then opening that in Excel. Finally, save the Excel spread sheet as a CSV. If all goes well, you’ll then be able to import the final CSV into bento.

Geofg

By: Dave Owen

Dave Owen — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:05:22 +0000

Thanks much for your review! I have spent several hours with Bento, and had hoped to bring in my home database. I love the integration with Apple Address Book, etc.

However Bento was not able to import a 1200 record csv file exported from Filemaker Pro 9, apparently due to a problem exporting fields with commas and/or returns in them.

For importing records, Bento turned out to be less capable than the Apple Address Book, which at least was able to import a tab delimited file exported from Filemaker Pro. This was a BIG disappointment.

By: Roman

Roman — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 05:17:45 +0000

GREAT review! Many thanks. I have ~700+ contacts in my Entourage address book. Can I export them to Bento, and if so, could i do mass mailings and mail merge? Thank you.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:23:18 +0000

I think its brilliant! I’ve been using FM 6 for years to manage my Scout Group membership list in a self built database from FM 3. Its OK (I’m not a power user!) but its difficult for other Scout Leaders to use. I saw Bento and thought I’d give it a go and its fantastic! It does exactly what I want, its very easy to use, I’ve pre-saved a load of collections for other leaders to use. I’ve worked out how to get it to show ages which is brilliant too. 3 minor issues which I’m sure will be sorted in the next release are: 1) No password control. I have kids personal data which I’d rather was password protected, like in FM 2) It can’t import FM documents, only CSV 3) AS of yet, I can’t rearrange the column order in Table View, so printing is a bit poor.

Overall, its great - I think it will appeal to home users, charities, clubs and organisations - the iLife customer as it were, the type of people who use iMovie rather than FCP, iPhoto instead of Aperture etc. 9/10

By: Chris Kubica

Chris Kubica — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 14:27:05 +0000

Does the title, “FileMaker Gets Bento” in some way refer to the culturally understood definintion of “Get Bent” as listed here:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=get+bent

By: Michael Lever

Michael Lever — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:55:46 +0000

Thank you. I’m not planning to upgrade to Leopard for the foreseeable future so cannot experience Bento. However, having emigrated from a PC to iMac and goodbye to Cardbox Pro after 20 years to become a novice with FM 9 Advanced, it would be super to have a library-wide search in FM. Cardbox had it (for years), right-click for a dialogue box, choice of actual or any field, enter text (boolean too), instant find.

By: Martin Lormes on FileMaker · All new Bento.

Martin Lormes on FileMaker · All new Bento. — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:47:51 +0000

[…] Geoff Coffey of Six Fried Rice has reviewed Bento. I haven’t given Bento any priority and I’ve been busy doing other things. Now I finally managed to read most of Geoff’s review (i.e. without watching his videos) and rather than going to the time and effort of writing one myself I’ve decided to just point everyone there. Categories […]

By: Vincenzo Menanno

Vincenzo Menanno — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:15:40 +0000

Geoff, great overview of Bento… I too was very surprised to see this application come out.

I do like the promise of this application and look forward to see how FileMaker one day will also benefit from modern operating system widgets and such things.

Exciting to see integration with other applications.

However, one of the things that irritates me is… if this is truly a mac only application, and FileMaker is wholly owned by Apple, then the UI should be consistent with other mac applications. In that area it just lacks finesse. When you click into a field … why are some of them really big and some just one row of a portal… If this is a truly a mac only application then whey don’t we see an inspector panel and the consistent font and color picker, things I would really hope that would make it into a Pro application. Who knows…

The other thing that falls short in my opinion is the lack of mail integration. This would be an essential piece if they wanted to really bring all these applications together.

I am also hampered by the fact that I am a FileMaker user and keep reaching for command-B and command-L to get to and from layout design view. I also really like the collections, and how one can simply drag them to the side bar.

To me it almost feels like a kid in the neighborhood … the neighborhood iLife and iWork… and then there is Bento.

I am excited to see what this all means for the FileMaker product line as well…

Ciao - Vincenzo