Over the years FileMaker Pro has developed into a competent database management system (DBMS) with a good range of features. One of its greatest strengths is support for both Windows and Mac operating systems. It's one of those rare products with which you can develop cross-platform applications. This alone is reason enough to choose it if you work with both environments.

FileMaker has made great strides towards being intuitive and user-friendly so that designing your first single-table database is a doddle. There are 16 pre-defined database templates to get both home and business users off to a quick start, for example, Recipes, Collections, Personnel Records and Purchase Orders. Alternatively, starting from a blank database is straightforward.

Each FileMaker Pro table inhabits a file with the .fp5 extension and once a table is defined, you work with various layouts to determine what appears on the screen. Layouts take the place of the objects often known as forms and reports in other DBMSs.

FileMaker can run in one of four modes: Browse, for inspecting existing records and adding new ones; Find, for locating a record or a subset thereof; Layout, for creating new views of your data; and Preview, for checking the appearance of printed output.

When creating a database, eight field types are at your disposal. Four of these are the familiar text, number, date and time types, and four are slightly more exotic. The container field type can hold image, audio or video files, OLE objects (such as spreadsheets or documents from other applications) and QuickTime file types are also supported.

A calculation field holds values calculated from data in the current record or from other records, and a summary field holds summarised data from records in the current file. Finally, there's a global field for values to be used in all records in the current file, for example, the rate of VAT to be used in price calculations.

Easy does it
Entering records requires only a click on the New Record button. Pasting .wav and .avi files into a container field is easy, and in Browse mode double clicking on the icon or thumbnail that's placed into the container field plays the sound bite or video. Container fields cannot be searched so you have to add a text field by which to identify them.

Once fields have been defined, a standard layout is generated automatically, showing all fields. The New Layout/Report assistant eases the production of further layouts for viewing data, for printing as a report and for 'mailmerge' form letters. Buttons can be added to layouts for application control; steps are selected from the ScriptMaker macro-writing tool to navigate between layouts, modes or fields and control structures such as If, Else and Loop are also available.

FileMaker Pro started life as a flat-file DBMS and has since acquired some degree of relational capabilities in response to the universal acceptance of the relational model as a means of storing all but the simplest sets of data. That's the good news.

Unfortunately, instead of embracing the recognised RDBMS (relational DBMS) terminology, for reasons never made clear, FileMaker has invented its own. Terms like 'master file', 'related file', 'related record' and 'related field' seem destined to cause confusion, and when introducing the 'match field', it's simply perverse for the manual to say 'sometimes called the key field or primary key'.

Lookups cause confusion too, because defining a lookup causes data to be copied into the 'master file' from a 'related file'. No link is maintained between the two, so if data is updated in the related file, these changes are not reflected in the master.

Apart from terminology and implementation idiosyncrasies, the adherence to the relational model is somewhat tenuous. There is no easy way of employing the checks and constraints for ensuring referential integrity of data nor of dealing with null values - incomplete records can be entered into the sample database provided so that incomplete and mis-interpretable data can be retrieved.

FileMaker databases can be published on the web using the Web Companion plug-in that comes as part of version 5, although some features, notably scripts, are not available in a published database.

Existing users will find that version 5 arrives with widespread changes, especially to the interface that has been redesigned with Microsoft Office users in mind.

There's now a New Layout/Report assistant, a table view of your data, improved ODBC support for sharing data with other ODBC-enabled applications, improved conversion from Excel spreadsheets and a range of styles to apply to your web pages.

Contact FileMaker 0845 603 9100, www.filemaker.co.uk