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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.

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