On Thursday, October 16, 2003, at 05:46 PM, J Philippe Chaperon wrote:
FileMaker Pro is a good substitute for Access. I have seen some
wonderful
databases done in Filemaker, but Peter could confirm whether Access is
more
'powerful' or has more features.
I'm not really going to go down that very well-travelled road: the
subject has been done to death by many far more knowledgeable than I.
What I will say, though, is that the topic is moot. Access will never
come to the Mac. Microsoft have made this very clear on numerous
occasions. Access by itself is not really a very good database product
- it need a sound knowledge of Visual Basic to make it work properly,
and this is a huge barrier in porting it to the Mac, so it just won't
happen. From several accounts MS Access has a limited life anyway.
There have been rumours floating around for a couple of years that
Microsoft will be dropping it in favour of an SQL stand-alone product.
FileMaker's limitations are well-known and loudly spelled out to
FileMaker Inc. as often as possible by developers, but despite them, it
perseveres as a flexible and rapid solution to a huge range of database
projects. BTW, FileMaker have announced that all future versions for
the Mac will be MacOS X only.
--
Peter Hinchliffe
Apwin Computer Services FileMaker Pro Solutions Developer
Perth, ::::::::::::::::::::::::
Western Australia Phone (618) 9332 6482 Fax (618) 9332 0913
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Mac because I prefer it -- Windows because I have to.
