Category Archives: Data Wrangling

All things data. Create it, retrieve it, update it, delete it. The art of making data actually interesting, with a focus on the most mundane of all data.. that of the small business world. If you live if invoice, time card, sales, manufacturing, planning, Excel sheet hell, then these posts are for you.

Snapshot Links

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

Sometimes you’ll be searching through some data, and after much fiddling about, find a useful subset of data. For example, all the current accounts that normally order at least 3x a week, but for some reason haven’t placed any orders … Continue reading →

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Top 10 Instant Web Publishing No-No’s

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

One of Filemaker’s least used, yet coolest, features is its ability to instantly publish your database to the web. That’s right. No HTML coding, no FTP’ing, no PHP, no nada. As long as you’re hosting your Filemaker solution with Filemaker … Continue reading →

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Bento 3 – Free Kit

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

Filemaker’s younger and simpler brother, Bento, is now offering a handy free demo and kit for its newest version (Bento 3). If you like databases, but hate all the programming bits, then Bento could very well be just the ticket … Continue reading →

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Join Tables, Many-To-Many solutions

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

In Filemaker, it’s all about relationships. In order to make your data fly, it’s a good idea to break out the data into appropriate tables. For example, if you’re running a small business, instead of putting all your data into … Continue reading →

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Filemaker “On the Go” Kit

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

Filemaker’s been around for a long time, but one of its most exciting developments was when they released a full Filemaker client for both the iPhone and the iPad last summer (2010). With the release of Filemaker Go, anyone with … Continue reading →

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Script Trick – Set Last Page

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

Going from meh to awesome is all in the details. Sometimes the little things are what make a tool truly great. One of the many small scripts I carry along with me in every solution I build is a Set … Continue reading →

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Basic Layout Categories

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

When building any database, but in this case a Filemaker Pro database, it helps to organize the layouts into categories. Typically within a Filemaker solution, the layouts will fall into to one of the three following categories: Detail List Print … Continue reading →

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Simple VCF to CSV converter. Online & Free

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

The bane of all data geeks’ existence? Converting data from one format to another. In a perfect world, all data would always simply be rows and columns with no additional anything. This is however, not the case. For example, a … Continue reading →

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Filemaker PDF Printing Trick

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

Printing on Filemaker is easy. You can even automate the printing of a PDF file via Filemaker’s own scripting tools (Scriptstep: Save Record as PDF). That’s all fine and well, but the best little PDF printing trick is to also … Continue reading →

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Don’t Enter, Just Scan

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Dirk Reynolds

A frequently requested feature in Filemaker databases is some sort of inventory management function. An easy thing to program, but a hard thing to maintain due to the tedious nature of inventory itself. Counting and entering what’s in stock is … Continue reading →

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