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Wendy Lee and her husband run Tiannan Woods Goats (http://tiannanwoods.com) in Philadelphia, TN. They have a small herd that they are raising to sell as meat. It is important that they keep careful records of breedings and in particular the following types of information:

• Knowing when the does are ready to kid
• Knowing when to give vaccinations
• Keeping performance records of the kids as they grow so that they know if they are feeding them too much or too little
• Tracking prices
• Tracking farm expenses

There are herd keeping programs available, but most of them are either for Microsoft Windows, are too expensive or are just not really what they needed. They have tried keeping records in a spreadsheet which works but is not ideal and since Wendy got a new iMac for Christmas which came with Leopard installed and a preview of Bento she decided to give it a spin and soon knew that she had found what she needed.

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Although Bento™ support both date and time fields it is possible to combine both a date and time in a single field. This combined field is used in the integrated iCal Libraries and it may be necessary to take the data from the two individual fields and combine them into one new one. Unfortunately this is not as easy as it could be so here is a quick guide to doing it.
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One of the tasks I hate doing is adding multiple records to iCal. For example, each year I like to add entries for the Formula 1 races* but with eighteen races in 2008 this becomes fairly boring and repetitive with a lot of copying and pasting from whichever source I decide to use. Bento allows me to take some of the tedium out of this by getting the data into a simple CSV file and then import it into the iCal Events Library of Bento.

1. Occasionally you can find the data you want as a CSV file on the web. A Google search for ‘2008 f1 csv’ revealed a site, Junction34.com, with the calendar as a CSV file. If you cannot find the data then you will have to take a more hands-on approach and enter the data yourself, preferably into something like Numbers which can export a CSV file.
2. The CSV file can then be imported into Bento, directly into the iCal Library.




Click for a Larger View

3. Once the data has been imported you may need to change the Calendar since imported data defaults to ‘Bento’.

* I realise that there are iCals available on site such as iCalShare but I usually just want specific details such as the date and location and to set it as an all-day event.

Please Note: For more details about using Related Records Lists please refer to the article, ‘Related Records Lists’.

When you create a Related records List on a form it will inherit and use the fields currently displayed in the Table view of the source Library. However, if you want to change the fields which are displayed you can simply click on the Related Records List in the form and you will notice that the list of fields changes from showing the fields in the current Library to showing the fields in the Library which the Related Records List is based upon. This allows you to not just select and deselect the fields but you can also rename the fields (but note that the field in the originating Library will also be renamed).

It is also possible to re-order the fields in a Related Records List by clicking on the field name and dragging it to where you want that field to be.

Thanks to beachgrrrl over at the Bento™ forums for this tip.

Although it may not be immediately obvious it is possible to implement some basic logic and conditional calculations in Bento.

Assume, for example, that you want to keep track of sales, some of which have tax added to them and some of which do not. The easiest way to differentiate between the two is by using a checkbox and fortunately the the state of a checkbox is stored internally by Bento as a 1 or 0.

To re-create the above example you will need to create four fields.

1. An Amount field which in the example is formatted as a currency field.

2. A CheckBox which here is called Taxable.

3. A Calculation field which is called Tax Amount in this example. The formula is simply [Amount] * 0.175. This effectively populates the field with the tax amount for the total. The value is 0.175 because here in the UK the VAT rate is 17.5% so multiplying an amount by 0.175 adds 17.5%. The field is formatted as Currency just because it looks better if it is going to displayed anywhere.

4. A Calculation field called Total. This consists of [Amount] + ([Taxable] * [Tax Amount]). This is formatted as Currency.

Bento™ can make use of iCal and Address Book data and this is one of the strengths and selling points of the application. However this area could do with some additional explanation as there are some potential issues which you should be aware of.
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If you need to use two or more independent and separate Bento™ collections of Libraries, create another user
account on your Mac. Each new account has its own Bento data file stored in the Application Support folder in the user’s Library folder.

This tip was submitted by Jon Longworth (aka Jade in the Bento™ forums).

You can also simply copy or rename the bento.bentodb file in your user’s Library/Application Support/Bento folder and when you next start Bento it will create a new one. However, please ensure that Bento is not running when you attempt this.

In the screen-shot below you can see that I have three Bento files, each containing their own collection of Libraries: my personal Libraries, Libraries to do with work and Libraries used for examples for this site.

A Media filed can be used to store images, movies and sound files. The default behaviour is that when you drag and drop a file onto a Media field you store a copy of the actual file in your Bento database. Obviously this can lead to the database file becoming very large very quickly so an alternative is to hold down the Option (⌥) key when you drag a file onto a Media field. This stores the file’s alias, a link to the file rather than the file itself, which is around 4k in size, almost insignificant.

This tip was submitted by Jon Longworth (aka Jade in the Bento™ forums).

Bento™ can import and export data from and to CSV files. These are essentially plain text files where each record is stored on its own line and each item of data, or field, within a record is separated by a comma, hence Comma Separated Value or CSV file.

This article will explain how to import CSV data into both new and existing Libraries, how to export data from a Library to a CSV file and highlight some limitations with the CSV file format.
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You should always back up the data on your Mac and applications such as Time Machine make this easier than ever. However if you are not using Time Machine or performing other regular backups or you just want a snapshot of your collection of Libraries before you try something out you can perform a manual backup in Bento.
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