Dianne wrote -

>Pat,
>
>As a person who uses FileMaker Pro a lot (I'm a database specialist), I
>would recommend it as a way to avoid the "evil giant".

I also have been using Filemaker for a while, and have amalgamated data
from lots of other database formats into it, and found it the easiest to
understand and use, although it has some compatibilitay problems, such as a
suitable export format that can retain formatting (esp tabs, commas,
quotation marks, paragraph returns and such) that Access might read as a
field delimiter.

I think whatever we use as data managers, being aware of the requirements
for conversion to other formats is always worthwhile since other people may
one day want to make use of our data.

Gary Vines

Melbourne's Living Museum of the West
P.O. BOX 60 Highpoint City, 3032
Victoria, Australia
ph. +61 3 93183544
fax. +61 3 93181039
email- [log in to unmask]
www.livingmuseum.org.au