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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.

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.

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.

FileMaker, Inc. issued a press release yesterday which contained the news that over 250,000 users have downloaded Bento so far. The majority of the downloads have been done by North Americans and the company is just now beginning to distribute Bento around the world. In addition to English, Bento is now available in French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese.