First Look: Bento 2, personal database

View this article at: http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/10/27/bento.2.personal.database/

Monday, Oct 27, 2008 12:25pm

First Look: Bento 2, personal database

For years, the most popular Mac database has been FileMaker. While FileMaker has a reputation for being powerful and easy to use, it’s also geared more towards commercial developers, cross-platform development, or people who need heavy-duty data processing. If your database needs are much simpler, you could still use FileMaker, but you might find the program a bit more complicated than necessary. You could also use the Address Book, which comes with every Mac, but you might find that too limiting. For an easy database that’s also powerful enough for more than trivial tasks, consider FileMaker’s Bento 2.

A major focus of this new version is increased compatibility with other programs. One particularly annoying problem of using any database is transferring data from one program to another. Since many people store information in spreadsheets, you can now import (and export) data in Numbers, Excel, or text format (comma, semicolon, or tab-delimited).