Complete Transcript of Ryan Rosenberg – FileMaker Interview Host – Alan Ashendorf on Let’s Talk Computers September 22 2007
Alan: All businesses need to manage people, projects, and lots of information. Most businesses would like to accomplish this without having to do any programming. How can this be done? Our guest today is Ryan Rosenberg, Vice President of Marketing and Services with FileMaker, Inc. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Ryan. Ryan: Thanks, Alan. I’m glad to be here.
Alan: Ryan, just like with any business, I have lots of databases and I have tons of information that I need to manage. How do I get started?
Ryan: The first thing you need to do is to think about what kind of solution you are trying to get done. Is it customers’ lists that you are trying to manage or is it inventory that you are trying to manage? When you start up with FileMaker, we provide over 30 Starter Solutions that cover many of the most popular areas from Asset Management to Project Management to handling Creative Professional-type problems. Once you start with one of those starter solutions that will give you a leg up. You’ve then got a framework and you can modify it from there.
Alan: Any time you have to start from a completely blank screen – that’s scary. And just because my business is unique, there are always things that all businesses share and can I piggyback those?
Ryan: People who have a business commonly say that, “My business is unique.” And so, we allow you to go in and start with a Starter Solution and then modify it for your business. If you have a customer you will have a name and an address.
The next thing you are going to want to do, once you’ve figured out the Solution that you are going for is that you will want to get your data into FileMaker. One of the most popular ways is with Excel – we will directly read Excel format. You can take an Excel spreadsheet and you can open it up in FileMaker and just directly import information to say which field and that information in Excel goes into which field of FileMaker and then you are done.
In fact, if you don’t even want to do that, you can take an Excel spreadsheet and just drag it on top of FileMaker and FileMaker will directly import it and create all the screens, automatically for you.
Alan: You can say that I can convert my database to this format – that’s easy to say. But, it’s a lot easier just to drag it and drop it and have it done for me, automatically. Now, I’ve got my database. I haven’t done any kind of programming or any kind of coding. As a matter of fact, I haven’t even selected anything other than the Excel spreadsheet that I have already been working with.
Ryan: If you can work with Excel, you can use FileMaker. This is a popular misconception if you will, about databases. People sometimes feel that I need a programming degree to work with them. But you really don’t. FileMaker is designed for the non-programmer. It’s designed for anybody; for the knowledge worker who has information and needs to manage it. And for the small business owner who has a business to run and doesn’t have the time to go out and learn a complicated system. That’s what FileMaker is aimed at; that’s what it was built for.
Alan: Now I’ve got my database already set up and now I want to do my screens because, that’s where my users will be inputing the data. That’s where they have to verify whether the data is correct and that’s where all my records are going to be stored.
Ryan: In FileMaker there are two basic types of views. There’s a view that is called a List View where you are looking at all your information in a list. And that’s very comfortable and familiar to people that use Excel. There’s another view that we call the Form View, which is similar in nature to let’s say a paper form, if you can think about that. Let’s say a single record, maybe a single customer record and you bring that up on the screen and you see your customer’s name and address and perhaps information about what they have purchased in the past from you. You can open up either of these Views in our Layout Editor and you can drag and drop fields of information and move it around until you get those lists and those forms to look exactly right, as you want them to look. And then you close that mode and it will save all your changes. Now, any time you open up FileMaker your information is going to look the way that you want, as you wish to see it.
Alan: Now that I’ve got my Layouts and Customer Database and I’ve got all that information. But, there are a lot of times where it’s redundant information and the more that someone types that information in – there is a chance of their getting it wrong each time. Do you have it where I can select the information and then don’t have to type it?
Ryan: There are a number of tools for that. First of all, there are Drop Down Lists or Value Lists where what you can do on a particular field is fill in information in advance. A good example might be: A customer wants to add a list of products. You might have ten things that you are selling. Maybe you just made a little Drop Down List, which includes all the ten different things. Now you never have to type that in, again. You just click the List – enter a customer – click a product from the List and it adds it to the record. It’s that simple. We also provide many easy-to-use Sorting and Searching Tools that allow you to view your information in order. So, you can scan down lists, for example, looking for duplicates and then pull out the duplicate records.
Alan: And any time that I am looking at a screen, I’ve got information on there. But that information changes. And based on how that information has changed, I want to be notified. Let’s say that somebody owes us too much money. We don’t want to charge them for something else. You have Conditional Formatting that allows a user to see exactly what is going in real time.
Ryan: This is one of the hot features in our new FileMaker Pro 9. FileMaker Pro 9 makes it really easy for any one to apply Conditional Formatting. This is kind of a tricky thing to do. Some other solutions might require a program to get there. With FileMaker, all you need to do is to click on the field – open up a Dialog Box – and select the conditions you want to appear. Maybe you are going to make a field bold for one of your best customers. If you look at let’s say the amount that they have ever ordered from you – you make that field bold, if it’s over a certain amount. Or maybe, as you suggested for people who have an outstanding credit balance with you, so that if that credit balance gets over a certain amount – it goes red. You can get very fancy there. Maybe if they are one of your best customers and they have an outstanding credit balance, you make it green. And then you know that I had better call about this; but they are a really good customer, so maybe I had better take care. Again, you can do all of that, without programming, just by pointing and clicking.
Alan: Well, what about working with other types of databases? Suppose that you’ve got legacy databases? I’ve got SQL databases and now since I am going on the Web, I’ve got MYSQL databases. How can work with those?
Ryan: There are two ways. One common way that people will have an extract taken out of those databases and they will have it emailed to them or copied onto a file somewhere and then they can just import it into FileMaker Pro. And that works quite well, but it’s a manual process. In FileMaker Pro, we have added a new set of features that allow you to directly link to those databases, whether it’s MYSQL for the Web or Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server. And you can directly connect FileMaker to those databases. So, let’s say that you have an accounting package built on Microsoft SQL Server (and we were talking about credit a moment ago) – when your customer’s credit balance goes up you don’t have to re-enter that information into FileMaker Pro. You can just take the stat Field, and drag it onto your screen and it will appear right there, along with the customer’s name.
Alan: Let’s say we have all that information, but sometimes we can have too much information on the screen. How can I find information in my databases? How can I sort them in such a way that they are meaningful to me?
Ryan: FileMaker has many tools available. You can bring up information in a List View, for example. Click on the top of a List and it will just simply sort it for you. Or you can bring up sort of a By Example Screen for finding information. This is very simple. Let’s say that you’re looking at records of customers and you want to find everyone in the state of California. You simply go into Find mode and then when you look at the screen it will be all blank and you will go to the State field and you will type in “CA” for California and then you will get Find. That’s all it takes. You will find all your customers that are in the state of California. But, you can be much fancier than that. You can open up that same screen and say, “I want everyone in California who has purchased from me in the most recent quarter and who has also purchased from me two years ago.” So, again, you can kind of build up something in a kind of a point and click fashion in order to find information either in a simple fashion or in a fairly sophisticated fashion.
Alan: Plus the fact that you have a way of omitting records on the screen. They are still in the database, and I don’t want to mess with these 5 records or these 10 records and you can actually turn them off so that they do not show up on the screen.
Ryan: This models the way that people think. Programmers think when they think about finding information a big, long query. “I’m gong to add this here and delete that there, and I’m going to make into some big formula,” almost. People that aren’t programmers don’t think that way. What they think is sort of in “steps”. And that’s the way FileMaker works. First, I want to find everybody in California. Then I want to add all the people in Texas. Then I want to take everybody out in those two states who I haven’t talked to in the last three years, because I’m going to send them a mail campaign and I don’t’ want to spend money contacting people who haven’t bought from me in awhile. You can do that process I just floated out there in a stepwise fashion. It’s almost as if you were getting instructions from that person. Find me everybody in California. Now, add everybody in Texas. Now, remove all the people who haven’t bought in 3 years. Now, let me run my mail campaign. That’s a good example about how FileMaker is used and how accessible for the non-developer.
Alan: You can just say, “Show me all the records that I have just marked to be omitted.” It’s like a way of flagging certain records to deal with all of those records.
Ryan: That’s a good example. Let’s say that in school and you are classroom and you want to bring up all the students, but then you want to omit everybody who is not in the school band, for example. With just a couple of steps you can say, “bring me up al the records in this particular class and omit everybody who is not in the school band.”
Alan: Working with records, working with databases – from a user’s standpoint is completely different from a programmer’s standpoint, because a user has to work with these databases and has to be comfortable with what’s on the screen. A programmer just says, “Hey, give me a long list.”
Ryan: That’s right. I think one of the nice things about FileMaker, is the fact that it’s really a very sophisticated tool and a developer can use it to create a quite sophisticated solution, but at the same time it’s accessible to the users. So, whether you’re using FileMaker by yourself – just as a productivity tool for you, the same way that you would use Excel or whether or not you’re a user of a tool that someone else has created for you – using the Product, using the solution is very easy. All the things I mentioned, Searching and Sorting and Lists and Forms – all of those are accessible to anyone that uses FileMaker - whether the solution is one that you created or whether it’s a solution that someone created for you.
Alan: So many times when a user is editing information on screen, they make mistakes. And they want to be able to undo it. Well, usually you have like an Undo and a Redo and that’s it. But, you have multiple Undoes and Redoes, now.
Ryan: We do, actually. It’s very easy to someone who’s doing data entry to make mistakes. FileMaker has a lot of tools to make data entry, easy. You can have it Validate fields for you, as you enter them; you can have Drop Down Lists – but still, mistakes do get made. And now, we have the ability to back up, based on the information that you have entered and undo and undo, and undo multiple levels, so that if you make a mistake, it’s easy to undo it. You won’t have bad data in your database. As we all know, data is only as good as the quality of the information, which is entered.
Alan: From an end user’s standpoint, working with any kind of screen, it will be a constant series of mistakes. From a programmer’s standpoint, nobody makes mistakes. Everything is going to be letterperfect, because they are going to store all the information, perfectly into the database. You have to validate all that information before it gets into the database.
Ryan: That’s right. And again, there’s a lot of ways of validating information from the very simple, which is saying that, “This field can only contain a number or text” – to the very sophisticated, where you check information in one field, against information in another. “I’m going to enter a customer name in and I’m going to validate, before I allow you to save that to make sure that customer is not already in my database,” for example. So, you have a real range of data checking that you can set up in FileMaker.
Alan: So many times when you are working with some of these database programs that are already out there on the market – as soon as you make an entry, it’ already stored. You have the ability to allow the user to determine when and where to save the information and to not save the information by committing it.
Ryan: There’s a lot of flexibility in FileMaker. You can have it operate the same way that you do in Excel – you enter information in and you move out of a field and then the information gets stored. Maybe you move out of a record in FileMaker in a List and it will store the information. Or you can set it up in a much more sophisticated fashion, where nothing gets stored until you push a button and then it goes out and checks your database to make sure all the information you are entered is valid.
Alan: So, you can validate “record by record”, but you can also Validate “everything that’s on that screen”, at one time?
Ryan: That’s correct. You can go ahead and validate “field by field”, put information into a particular field, let’s say a phone number field – and the database will check to make sure it’s a valid phone number. That would be simple validation. But, you can do very sophisticated validation where you enter information into a product. And then it makes sure that not only is it a valid product, but it makes sure that the product that you’re entering in there is compatible with other products that are on that order form. So, that you can really ensure that a customer’s order is going to go out correctly. Another thing to point out is that information in your database can be linked together. So, if you have information that’s new, let’s say a “new customer.” You can link that to older information that you have, such as “prior shipments” to make sure that new customer you think is new, actually isn’t an older customer who just hasn’t come back around in awhile so that you can confirm and not get double information into your database.
Alan: Ryan, we are out of time. We will have to pick up this conversation again, next time. And if somebody would like to find out more information about FileMaker Pro 9, where would they go?
Ryan: It’s www.filemaker.com
Alan: Ryan, it’s been our pleasure to have you as our guest here on Let’s Talk Computers, showing us how we can build our own applications and without having to know all of these programming languages. And we look forward to having you back on the air again, talking about some of the other exciting features, real soon.
Ryan: Thanks. I’ve really enjoyed coming on your show.