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August 31, 2004
Access for Mac OS X?
Posted by Sandy
I have a client who has experienced three hard drive crashes in two years. He's fed up and ready to move from PC to a Mac.
There's just one problem: he uses Microsoft Access for his business. Until he can find a replacement for Access and find a way to move his Access data to Mac OS X, he's stuck with a Windows machine.
Microsoft says it does not offer Access in any version of Office 2004 because of the development costs and because Filemaker has the Mac market sewn up.
So... can anyone out there tell me if it's possible (and if it's hard) to move data from Access for Windows to Filemaker for OS X? Is there another option?
Comments (4)
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1. Brad Hutchings on August 31, 2004 06:18 PM writes...
Moving data is fairly easy. You can use REALbasic to write a program that connects to Access via ODBC (some third party ODBC software may be required) and insert the data into a REALbasic database, Valentina, MySQL, etc. Porting the Access application is a little more difficult.
Why not run the Access program in Virtual PC and slowly transition to new solutions?
Permalink to Comment2. Joe Mullins on August 31, 2004 07:31 PM writes...
I know that you already know this, but it should be pointed out that if they were really hard drive crashes (not software issues) these are just as likely to happen on the mac as on the PC.
Like brad said, getting the data out isn't terribly hard, the real question is what kind of application logic have you got going on? What kind of business is he running.
There are about a million turnkey filemaker solutions out there, and chances are he can find something that fits well and needs little customization.
Permalink to Comment3. Knol Aust on September 1, 2004 09:20 AM writes...
You could always use OSX's built-in MySQL database and Apache server w/ PHP to setup a remote or local database with web interface. This, of course, is probably a bigger transition than your client is seeking but the most efficient overall for custom functions and design if familiar with PHP and SQL in general. MySQL is by far more cost-saving (it's free!) than Filemaker and/or Access and from experience more secure overall.
If Filemaker is the preferred option, once you've reviewed all options, here's a link that covers the basics of data migration between the two.
http://filemakeradvisor.com/doc/14267
Permalink to Comment4. Rajesh on September 3, 2004 03:26 PM writes...
.com sells FMPro which does Access to Filemaker migration. Disclaimer: I have never used it so I can't testify about ease.
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