FileMaker Bento 1.0: Half Cooked, But Not Bad

I've been thinking about finding an easy way to organize information on my Mac for a while. Bare Bones' Yojimbo has been on my radar for a while. But, I wanted more of a, for want of a better word, database-y application. Currently, I've got bits and pieces of collections of information for various projects stored in Microsoft OneNote (for Windows), Google Docs, and Zoho Creator. So, when I saw FileMaker Bento announced a few weeks ago, it seemed like a good fit for what I wanted. It has a $49 list price and is a few dollars cheaper at Amazon.

Before continuing on about FileMaker Bento, I wanted to mention that the word bento is a Japanese word for a self-contained boxed meal (usually for lunch in a container with separate compartments for each food type). Here's a cameraphone photo of a somewhat non-traditional bento lunch I ate recently. I thought the name choice for the small self-contained FileMaker Bento was a good one in comparison to other larger and more elaborate products like FileMaker Pro.

A couple of things struck me about Bento as I read about it on its product website before I purchased it. First, it is a Leopard-only product. So, if you are still running Tiger (or even Panther like my iBook G4 :-), you need to upgrade to install and use Bento. The next thing that interested me was its integration with Mac OS X's Address book and iCal. Next, Bento's ability to store media data like JPEG images, QuickTime videos, and MP3 audio appealed to me. Finally, I liked the idea of having a set of 20 pre-built templates to kickstart using the product.

It took a few minutes of looking around at Bento's user interface and some of its nomenclature (Libraries and Collections) to get comfortable. A Library is a database table. A Collection is a subset of a Library. And, a Smart Collection is a Library subset selected by some criterion (or criteria). Collections look like a SQL View (non-editable) to me. There is also the concept of Related Records that lets you link to a different Library or Collection (in other words a relation between tables). My guess is that most people will just use it as a flat file database though.

The templates turned out to be very useful to quickly get an idea of what can be done with Bento. It was very easy to delete unneeded fields and add ones I wanted to the template.

The next feature set I looked at was syncing Bento with Address Book and iCal. My Address Book entries are descended from data that started out on an HP 95LX MS-DOS based handheld computer from around 1991 or so. It has moved from device to device and all kinds of file formats and Personal Information Managers (PIMs). To say it has part of it that are odd looking is an understatement. Bento doesn't show all the available fields. So, my contacts list looked even odder since some entries showed only a name, nickname, or (in one case) just a phone number. I needed to select to display a couple of more fields before it started to make sense to me. The iCal sync turned out to be a bit problematic for me. The Home and Work calendars synced fine. However, I also have iCal bringing in a Google Calender feed where I list movie openings, try to track TV season premieres (which are all over the calendar these days), and even a few music release dates. Bento does not appear to sync with these iCal sync subscriptions.

The most important task for me was getting existing data from wherever it was into Bento. Bento only understands one external file format: CSV (Comma Separated Values). This seemed like a simple but effective way to get data in and out of Bento. But, there seems to be a little problem here. I exported a flat file table from Zoho Creator (a web database) to a CSV file. Nearly everything imported fine into Bento. The exception were date fields. Date data could be imported if I declared the Bento field to be a simple text type. However, they would not import into a Bento date field. Looking at the documentation, it looked like the DD-MM-YYYY format Zoho Creator used might be the problem since Bento wants to see incoming dates as MM/DD/YYYY. Being too lazy to write a quick Ruby script to change all the dates in Zoho created CSV file, I grabbed an Excel spreadsheet with a column filled with dates and used Excel 2008 for Mac to export a CSV file. Excel exports dates in the Bento-desired MM/DD/YYYY format. However, this didn't import into a Bento date field either.

At this point, I created a test Library with two fields (text and date) and two records. When I exported this to a CSV file, only the text field contents showed up in the file. So, as far as I can tell, Bento cannot import date data into a date field (though it can import them into a text field) and cannot export dates at all. This is the show stopper for the moment since I really want to be able to move my data around without restrictions. However, I'll guess that there will be a Bento 1.1 release one of these days that fixes these problems.

NOTE: A moderator from the FileMaker Bento forum named TSGal dropped by my personal Mac blog where I first noted this problem and was kind enough to provide a detailed workaround.

You can read what other Bento users have found at FileMaker's product discussion area found at...

FileMake Bento Forums