MS Access User Moving to FMP7

[alterbentzion]

I'm having an awfully hard time learning FileMaker. (My wife says I went through this six years ago, too, when I first learned MS Access.) I really want to believe that FMP is easy-to-use, but I just don't know...

 

I think part of the problem is that I've gotten used to solving/analyzing problems in Access-think, and FMP really does represent a different paradigm. Is anyone aware of a resource which would "translate" procedures from Access-speak to FileMaker-speak?

 

Thank you very much.

[J Wenmeekers]

Just one thing to do:

 

1. Listen to your wife

2. You can’t translate Accessekees to FileMakerees. Filemaker is an whole other beast than Access.

 

The level of understanding you can expect to achieve depends on the amount of time you spend practicing techniques.

Reading alone will not enable you to master the material, although it is the basis.

 

The manual and online help is a good point to start.

Practicing the techniques doesn’t just mean implementing the solutions as presented.

It’s important to learn the concepts, rather than the sequence of steps. Almost every script, calculation and relationship will teach you something.

Take what you learn and apply it to your own little solutions that you build.

 

Mastering FM is like learning to play a musical instrument. The more you practice, the more you will be able to determine when and how to use the new skills.

 

Ask yourself the following questions :

 

- Would it be faster if the computer did this ?

- Am I repeating steps that could be automated ?

- Are there too many steps for another person to remember if I told them how to do it ?

- Can I simplify the process ?

 

The time invested up front in playing with FM will pay off handsomely in the long run.

 

FM can do just about anything you can think of when it comes to organizing, processing and transferring data within a file structure. But, the integrity of any structure, including that of a FM database, depends entirely on the strength of the foundation.

The foundation in this case is your ability to understand the operation of each and every function. It is important to understand the individual functions themselves.

 

There are more than 100 different functions in FM. Some you may use all the time, some never, but all are important if you want to know FM inside out.

The key is to learn those functions. There is no way around it.

Pick a few a day, depending on the difficulty of the function, you can learn all of them in about a month.

Take the time and do the groundwork...no pain, no gain....

Learning the functions, one by one, together with Scriptmaker, is more like an investment in your (FM) future.

It will pave the way to creating calculations containing multiple functions.

[PictureDude]

Thanks for your advice!

 

Plan on using it!

 

JT

[aaa]

I came to FM from clipper and ACCESS. Now i forgot ACCESS and dont want to remember it. This is my opinion.

If you want to convert your data to FM, you can convert it from ACCESS to EXCEL or DBF format, then import to FM. Your other works(layouts, querys and other) which you did in ACCESS, you must do anew in FM. FM works faster. FM is easy to use. FM is easy for programming. And all works you can do in FM quickly. Sory for my badly english.

[alterbentzion]

Your English is no problem!

 

The thing that's giving me difficulty is not the process of setting up new tables, estabishing their relationships, and creating layouts, per se. Those concepts have fairly clear parallels in Access.

 

But there are other procedures in Access that I've come to depend on, and I really don't understand how to accomplish those same functions in Filemaker. I want to experiment and read through the Help files (and I do own a book on Filemaker, which I've been slogging through), but I need some direction, someone to tell me which procedures/functions I should be learning so that I can do in Filemaker what I used to do in Access.

 

For example (and this is the one that is bugging me the most), in Access you can select records based on various criteria (e.g., all women in a given ZIP code who have come to previous fundraisers) and save that criteria set as a "query" within the database. At a later date, you can open that "query" and view a new found set of records. How would I do that in Filemaker? I've read about using Find mode - but then how do I save/preserve the set of criteria I've just used, so that I don't have to do all of that work again the next time? Does it require creating a new layout and scripting it? How do I do that?

[Inky Phil]

Hi Albertzion

To achieve the same result in FMP one would perform the find one required manually ie women,givenzip,previous.

 

If you then immediately write a script (called something relevant to the find) with the steps

'enter find mode'

'perform find'

 

it will adopt and store the criteria of the last performed manual find.

All you need to do then is call the script when required and hey presto!

 

if you ever open the script again it will ask you on closing if you wish to keep the criteria it has or replace it with the most recent manually entered criteria

 

HTH

 

Phil

[-Queue-]

If the criteria is static, then you don't even need the Enter Find Mode step. A Perform Find [Restore] step on its own will suffice.

[Maarten Witberg]

To make the information complete, in fm7 you can set the search criteria (fields, filters) for Perform Find in the dialog in the scriptmaker. Unlike fm6 which can only remember one search filter per script like Inky Phil described.

 

kjoe

[aaa]

You see that there is many way to do what you want. But the most near ACCESS query is Queue suggestion. Not afraid, lose any time,learn FM, and you will be lucky, and win more time than lose. Ask your questions here! Be well.