What is the best way to import a Filemaker Pro (5.0 v1) database into Access?
Use FMP's ODBC add-in in Access; you'll need to download it from FMP's
website. You can use it to link to the FMP table and run one or more
Append queries to load the data into (pre-created empty) Access
tables.
Any user interface will have to be rebuilt from scratch. FileMaker's
forms and reports are utterly different from Access's.
If anyone has any experience converting between Filemaker and Access, any
other advice would be much needed and greatly appreciated.
Well, you've got my sympathy... <g>
Just some general comments: FileMaker tables are often more like a
hybrid between a Table and a Query; they often contain calculated
fields and lookup fields which are not appropriate in an Access table.
In addition, due to the architecture of FileMaker, tables will often
be incompletely normalized; you may need to use the Table Analyzer or
(better) some serious skull sweat to restructure the tables into a
more normalized structure.
One warning: if you're an expert in FileMaker and just learning
Access, your hardest job will not be learning Access (though that's
indeed a good bit of work); it will be UNlearning "the way things are
always done", because that is very likely not to be the best way to do
things in Access! For example, you will find that you're using much
less code and much more SQL Queries.
The two jobs I've done converting such databases were at least as much
work as building an application from scratch. Migrating the data saved
the effort of reentering it, but everything else just took a lot of
work!
John W. Vinson[MVP]
