William Porter

Providing tips about printing in Bento may seem a bit impertinent. After all, unlike its big brother, FileMaker Pro, Bento isn't really designed for printing reports. It's built instead for storing and retrieving an individual user's data. If the tasks you are going to ask your database to perform require a lot of printing, you should consider using FileMaker Pro instead. But if Bento works great for you most of the time, and you want to know more about how to get the best printed output from it, then read on.

The print dialog box

It's always been easy to create a straightforward database in FileMaker Pro, and with the enhancements in FileMaker Pro 11, even a newbie can start entering data immediately. But it's more challenging to figure out how to create useable printed reports. Here are a few tips that will help you design attractive and useful printed reports in FileMaker Pro. (Using Bento instead? We'll cover Bento in a separate article.)

Input vs. output

Tumblr is a newer and easier-to-use alternative to well-established online blogging services like WordPress ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), TypePad ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ) , and Blogger. And yet Tumblr manages to rival the big guys in its feature set.

Post haste

TypePad is a full-featured online blogging service run by the folks at Six Apart. Six Apart became famous almost a decade ago for creating Movable Type, one of the first major blogging applications, and one that is still widely used. Movable Type is installed on your own Web server, giving you total control of every aspect of your blogging system. The TypePad application on the other hand runs entirely in your Web browser, and TypePad also hosts your blog for you online. TypePad competes with other paid and free online blogging services such as WordPress ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), Blogger, and LiveJournal.

Cost

A year after the release of the FileMaker 10 database program, version 11 has arrived, with new tools and great new features that make it even easier to use. FileMaker 11 also puts many cool database tricks within the reach of ordinary users. FileMaker 11 may be the best FileMaker ever.

For the uninitiated, the the database half of FileMaker family consists of FileMaker Pro and its big brother, FileMaker Pro Advanced. FileMaker Pro Advanced has a few utility features that matter to full-time database developers: a debugger, a database analysis tool, the ability to create custom functions, custom menus, and more. Otherwise, Pro and Pro Advanced are very similar products--in fact, FileMaker Pro remains a remarkably powerful development tool.

Do you keep a diary on your computer? Do you blog, but hate your blogging service's editor? Do you find yourself using your word processor to write notes about a variety of subjects, and then find it difficult to locate those notes later? If the answer is yes to any of the above, you may be just the kind of person MacJournal 5.1.4 was designed for.

Journaling

In 2005, I reviewed Nisus Writer Express and gave it good marks, while noting that it may not appeal anyone who needs the tools found in Microsoft Word. Since that review, Nisus has released Nisus Writer Pro, and I have to admit that Nisus Writer Pro might actually be able to woo some users away from Word. Nisus Writer Pro competes with Word better than any word processor I've seen in a very long time.

Express and Pro

Pagehand 1.0.6 has the most elegant user interface of any word processor I've ever used. By "elegant," I mean that the exceptional beauty of the program is closely related to the program's ease of use. But Pagehand's elegance is aristocratic. It's not meant for menial work like, oh, index creation or outlining. Pagehand is like a Mont Blanc "writing instrument," designed for individuals whose writing needs are simple enough that they have time to enjoy the experience of writing.

Feature lists are overrated

There are three types of people in the word processing world: those who use Microsoft Word because they have to, a smaller group who use Microsoft Word because they actually like it, and a third group, who don't have to use Word and are interested in alternatives. For these independent-minded Mac OS X users, there are now a number of strong alternatives to Word, including Apple's Pages ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), Nisus Writer (Pro or Express), Scrivener ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ), and Mellel 2.6.1, from RedleX. With the release of version 2.6 earlier this year, Mellel stands as a very attractive alternative to Word, especially for academic users, technical writers, and linguists.

Structured and flexible

There's something for everyone in version 10 of the Mac's most popular database management program, FileMaker Pro, and its big brother, FileMaker Pro Advanced. Developers can now be more responsive to user actions, while users can now customize certain aspects of the database without having to call in a developer.

Which program?

The first thing that struck me about the new version of FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced released Monday is that the file format hasn't changed. In its first dozen years, FileMaker got a new file format every other version. But this new release uses the same format (.fp7) that FileMaker has had for nearly five years now, since the release of FileMaker Pro 7.

Why does this matter? The upgrade from FileMaker Pro 6 to FileMaker Pro 7 was perhaps the most significant upgrade in the program's history, but that great step forward twisted more than a few ankles at the time, and those of us who lived through it aren't eager to do that again just yet.

The debut version of FileMaker's Bento offered users an interesting product, but reviewers and users complained about the program's limitations. FileMaker listened to that feedback, as the newly released consumer-oriented database application boasts a number of significant improvements, including better data import and export, enhancements to the spreadsheet-like table view, on-the-fly customization of forms, and the ability to share libraries. In short, Bento 2 is a much more mature product. With this update, Bento is more than just interesting--it might actually be useful.

What is Bento? At first glance, it looks like a tool for tying together otherwise disparate digital "stuff" on your hard disk, like an e-mail message in Mail, a couple of contact records in Address Book, some expense receipts, a to-do list, some deadlines in iCal, and a couple of word processing or spreadsheet documents. But at a more basic-- and in my opinion, more useful-- level, Bento is a very slick, very easy-to-use database management system for individual users, whether you're at home or in your office.