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Many Bento users want to create a time-recording system of some type. This may be for something such as billing customers, tracking hours contributed by volunteers or monitoring employees. Although these are all slightly different the core functionality is the same and this article will explore some of the various options available.
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FileMaker Inc. have just launches a sweepstake where they are going to give an iPhone 3G away in July, August and September to the three people who submit the best Bento stories. The good news is that you don’t have to have bought Bento to take part (you could use the trial version) whilst the bad news is that the contest is only open to residents of the United States so that’s me out of the running for a start!

Anyway, more details are on the FileMaker site along with the full terms and conditions.

After a long period of no updates I just wanted to assure you that BentoUsers has not been abandoned and the lack of activity recently has simply been due to an excessive amount of work. In addition to teaching myself Cocoa so that we can start producing applications for OS X at work I also attended WWDC in San Francisco in the first half of June which was a fantastic week where I not only learnt a lot about Mac software development but I also managed to meet some of the FileMaker Inc. team behind Bento.

Normal service will be resumed shortly with lots of new tips and articles planned.

FileMaker Inc. have just released some new videos to help promote Bento. They focus on four types of user and show how they can use Bento.

The videos are available on the FileMaker web site.

Bento is essentially a flat-file database application although it does contain some basic relational functionality despite great efforts having been made to hiding the inner complexities from the user.

If the above sentence has left you scratching your head then you need to read this article because it will explain what a database is, what a flat-file database is and what relational functionality is.
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If you are new to databases then the whole area of fields, records, tables and forms in Bento Libraries may be somewhat confusing, especially understanding how forms relate to fields and records. The short video, below, will hopefully help to visually explain this. Read more

As of Bento 1.0v2, it appears that when you export data the CSV file may not be properly formed if any of your fields contain one or more double-quotes. The CSV file format allows for each field to be surrounded by double-quotes and to avoid confusion with these, any double-quotes which appear in a field are doubled-up. In Bento’s case, the issue seems to be that for each double-quote in the field, the closing double-quote is moved one character to the left.

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When you link two Libraries via a Related Records List Bento manages the links internally which makes life easier for most people but can present a problem if you want to import two CSV files which contain related data and link them back together. There is currently no automatic way to re-link the data but you can make life much easier with a bit of planning.
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When you export data from Bento to a CSV file there is no way to specify the order that the fields will be exported in and Bento simply exports the data in the order that the fields were created. This can be a problem if you are going to use the data in, for example, a pre-existing Numbers document where you need the columns to be displayed in a particular order.

The way to get around this is to follow these steps:

1. Export the data from Bento as a CSV file.
2. Open the CSV file in a spreadsheet such as Numbers or Excel.
3. Re-order the columns in the spreadsheet.
4. Export the data as a CSV file from the spreadsheet.
5. Import this new CSV file into Bento, creating a new Library.
6. If you want to, delete the original Library and rename the new one to give it the original Library’s name.

Now, whenever this Library is exported the fields will be in the correct order.

The Bento User Guide is available from within Bento via the Help menu as a PDF document. As of version 1.0v2 of Bento it is 100 pages long and, although I would not suggest reading it from cover to cover, it is worth skimming through it to familiarise yourself with it as it contains a lot of useful information and tips which you may otherwise miss.

Unfortunately there is no printed version available, even in the boxed version. If you want to print your own version but would like to reduce the paper usage, remember that you can always go to the ‘Layout’ print settings and change the number of pages per sheet and two pages per sheet is still readable as long as you have reasonable eyesight or glasses.

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