http://www.bentousers.com WRITTEN BY BENTO™ USERS FOR BENTO USERS Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:08:44 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.bentousers.com/20080720-tracking-hours/ 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 ... http://www.bentousers.com/20080709-bento-sweepstakes/ 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 ... http://www.bentousers.com/20080622-not-abandoned-just-busy/ 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. http://www.bentousers.com/20080520-new-bento-videos/ 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 ... http://www.bentousers.com/20080430-an_introduction_to_databases/ 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. Download this video at 400x300 (1.6 MB) Download this ... http://www.bentousers.com/20080429-fields-records-tables-forms/ 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 ... http://www.bentousers.com/20080427-fixing_csv_exports/ 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 ... http://www.bentousers.com/20080411-importing-related-data-into-bento/ 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 ... http://www.bentousers.com/20080411-field-orders-in-csv-exports/ 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 ... http://www.bentousers.com/20080403-the-bento-user-guide/