FileMaker 11 delivers charting, 'on-the-fly' reporting

p Apple-owned FileMaker on Tuesday unveiled the next major version of its database product, a href="http://www.filemaker.com/products/filemaker-pro/"FileMaker Pro 11/a. /p p In a recent study, the company found that 80 percent of the people who look at FileMaker already have a task in mind. With this type of feedback, FileMaker set out to make the new version faster and more productive for new users. /p p "It's very much a back to basics release for us," Ryan Rosenberg, vice president of marketing and services at FileMaker, told CNET. "We think ease of use is the core proposition in a database." /p p To help users receive started, FileMaker added a new "Invoices" template, a task many new users want to receive up and running with quickly. FileMaker now has 31 starter templates included in the application. /p div class="cnet-image-div image-big float-none" style="width: 610px" img class="cnet-image" src="/i/bto/20100309/invoice_610x408.png" alt="" width="610" height="408" / p class="image-caption"Creating an invoice in FileMaker Pro 11/p span class="image-credit"(Credit: FileMaker)/span /div p One of the big new features of FileMaker 11 is charting. Rosenberg explained that unlike a spreadsheet, charts created with a FileMaker database will update dynamically as the user browses data or views an invoice, for example. The charts can also be published to the Web using FileMaker's built-in tools. /p p On-the-fly reporting is also new, allowing users to create spreadsheet-like documents with totals and subtotals. Rosenberg likened these to pivot tables in spreadsheets. /p p The new version also adds an Inspector, a feature many people are used to seeing in applications like Photoshop and Microsoft Office. The Inspector shows a palette on your desktop, allowing you to quickly pick to align text, change colors and other simple tasks. /p div class="cnet-image-div image-big float-none" style="width: 610px" img class="cnet-image" src="/i/bto/20100309/document_library_610x408.png" alt="" width="610" height="408" / p class="image-caption"A new media library/p span class="image-credit"(Credit: FileMaker)/span /div p FileMaker 11 is now a Cocoa application, which means that it is fully native on Mac OS X. There are a href="http://www.filemaker.com/products/?nav=products-buttonn"four versions of the database app available/a: FileMaker Pro, FileMaker Pro Advanced, FileMaker Server, and FileMaker Server Advanced. /p p Pricing starts at $299. /p pOriginally posted at a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10466301-37.html" class="origPostedBlog"News - Apple/a/p

9 Mar 2010, 5:13 pm | click here to view more