The new Apple Numbers spreadsheet in iWork 08 looks promising. However
it does not seem to be integrated with Filemaker. Looks like I will
still have to use Excel (XLS) for data exchange.

Has anyone been experimenting with Numbers and Filemaker?

Michael Paine

In article <46bbe7bf$0$1462$afc38c87 [at] news.optusnet.com.au>,
Michael Paine <mpaine [at] tpgi.com.au> wrote:

> The new Apple Numbers spreadsheet in iWork 08 looks promising. However
> it does not seem to be integrated with Filemaker. Looks like I will
> still have to use Excel (XLS) for data exchange.
>
> Has anyone been experimenting with Numbers and Filemaker?

Can you clarify what you'd expect by "integration?" I expect my copy of
Numbers to show up today, but by the docs it should be perfectly capable
of emitting something FMP can read.

Post removed (X-No-Archive: yes)

"Integration" can work two ways. Open Access (circa 1985) allows me to
filter relational database records and then send them, as a flat file,
to its spreadsheet module, or to directly graph the data with its
graphics module. The other way is for the spreadsheet to be able to
access (filtered) data directly from the database.

With Apple's long-standing association with Filemaker, was it too much
to hope the latter feature would be in its Numbers spreadsheet?

I regularly process and export Filemaker data as XLS and then have the
tedious job of turning this into a variety of charts. Because the number
of records (ie rows) can change, I need to manually fix the data ranges
for the charts, as well as sorting the data prior to charting.

Michael Paine


Gregory Weston wrote:
> In article <46bbe7bf$0$1462$afc38c87 [at] news.optusnet.com.au>,
> Michael Paine <mpaine [at] tpgi.com.au> wrote:
>
>
>>The new Apple Numbers spreadsheet in iWork 08 looks promising. However
>>it does not seem to be integrated with Filemaker. Looks like I will
>>still have to use Excel (XLS) for data exchange.
>>
>>Has anyone been experimenting with Numbers and Filemaker?
>
>
> Can you clarify what you'd expect by "integration?" I expect my copy of
> Numbers to show up today, but by the docs it should be perfectly capable
> of emitting something FMP can read.

In article <46bfac0e$0$18984$afc38c87 [at] news.optusnet.com.au>,
Michael Paine <mpaine [at] tpgi.com.au> wrote:

> "Integration" can work two ways. Open Access (circa 1985) allows me to
> filter relational database records and then send them, as a flat file,
> to its spreadsheet module, or to directly graph the data with its
> graphics module. The other way is for the spreadsheet to be able to
> access (filtered) data directly from the database.
>
> With Apple's long-standing association with Filemaker, was it too much
> to hope the latter feature would be in its Numbers spreadsheet?

To hope, no, but to expect ... well, yeah. The only real relationship
between Apple and FileMaker is that one company owns the other.
FileMaker, Inc, is still a 3rd-party application vendor by any
meaningful evaluation. They don't collaborate any more, or any more
readily, than any other two application vendors. There's a world of
complexity in both the development and legal realms between what you
want and transferring data between different aspects of a single data
management package.

> I regularly process and export Filemaker data as XLS and then have the
> tedious job of turning this into a variety of charts. Because the number
> of records (ie rows) can change, I need to manually fix the data ranges
> for the charts, as well as sorting the data prior to charting.

Numbers has a menu item to provide feedback. I'd recommend you find a
good way to formulate your needs/desires as feature requests. A good
starting point might be to call for AppleScript support, of which
numbers currently has exactly none. Looks like you'd need (for starters)
- set cell value
- define and name a range
- sort a range