On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 19:38:33 +1300, Helpful Harry wrote:

I've just used the Import Records function in FileMaker Pro 18 for the
first time ... boy, is it a horrible change. It's far more cumbersome
to use.

You used to have a nice small window and be able to easily drag fields
up and down to change where the incoming data went, but now you have a
huge window and are force to use silly pop-up menus of field names to
get the data into the correct fields. Whether or not a line of data was imported used to be denoted by a simple arrow, but now it has the words "Import" and "Don't Import".

Why on earth did they change it to this overly complicated mess? :o(

Things like that happen - usually a sign of managment change and a team
of programmers who are motivated to "improve" things for the "better".

In fact this one should have been a "never change a winning team" - I do
not see any improvement in the way how the things were and how you
describe them.

But maybe it's one of the things to "adopt" to the common way of Microsoft-thinking. Many things are done not the way that they should be
done, but do follow a de-facto standard, given by most common software.

I can't speak for this import function. But from my experience, the
filemaker sort dialog feels much more natural than the libre office /
open office sort dialog from spreadsheets, which does mimic the excel
behavior - in a worse way.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

I've just used the Import Records function in FileMaker Pro 18 for the
first time ... boy, is it a horrible change. It's far more cumbersome
to use.

You used to have a nice small window and be able to easily drag fields
up and down to change where the incoming data went, but now you have a
huge window and are force to use silly pop-up menus of field names to
get the data into the correct fields. Whether or not a line of data was imported used to be denoted by a simple arrow, but now it has the words "Import" and "Don't Import".

Why on earth did they change it to this overly complicated mess? :o(


Helpful Harry :o(

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 2019-10-02 06:38:33 +0000, Helpful Harry said:

I've just used the Import Records function in FileMaker Pro 18 for the
first time ... boy, is it a horrible change. It's far more cumbersome
to use.

You used to have a nice small window and be able to easily drag fields
up and down to change where the incoming data went, but now you have a
huge window and are force to use silly pop-up menus of field names to
get the data into the correct fields. Whether or not a line of data was imported used to be denoted by a simple arrow, but now it has the words "Import" and "Don't Import".

Why on earth did they change it to this overly complicated mess? :o(

For illustration, here's the Import Records windows.

Simple version from FileMaker Pro 17 and older (way back to the early days) <https://www.soliantconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/blog-fm-import-fm17-interface.jpg>


Messy version from FileMaker Pro 18 <https://www.soliantconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/blog-fm-import-field-mapping.jpg>



Helpful Harry :o(

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 2019-10-02 06:56:36 +0000, Martin Τrautmann said:

On Wed, 2 Oct 2019 19:38:33 +1300, Helpful Harry wrote:

I've just used the Import Records function in FileMaker Pro 18 for the
first time ... boy, is it a horrible change. It's far more cumbersome
to use.

You used to have a nice small window and be able to easily drag fields
up and down to change where the incoming data went, but now you have a
huge window and are force to use silly pop-up menus of field names to
get the data into the correct fields. Whether or not a line of data was
imported used to be denoted by a simple arrow, but now it has the words
"Import" and "Don't Import".

Why on earth did they change it to this overly complicated mess? :o(

Things like that happen - usually a sign of managment change and a team
of programmers who are motivated to "improve" things for the "better".

In fact this one should have been a "never change a winning team" - I do
not see any improvement in the way how the things were and how you
describe them.

But maybe it's one of the things to "adopt" to the common way of Microsoft-thinking. Many things are done not the way that they should be done, but do follow a de-facto standard, given by most common software.

I can't speak for this import function. But from my experience, the
filemaker sort dialog feels much more natural than the libre office /
open office sort dialog from spreadsheets, which does mimic the excel behavior - in a worse way.

The new window certainly looks like a Windows mess. The old way was
much more "Mac-like" and simpler.

Newer versions of Adobe Acrobat also went down the "make it more
Windows" approach, and it too is an awful mess to use. Every time you
want to 'Save As' a file, you have to got through extra steps that
simply aren't necessary.


Helpful Harry :o(

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Thu, 3 Oct 2019 12:30:44 +1300, Helpful Harry wrote:

Messy version from FileMaker Pro 18 <https://www.soliantconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/blog-fm-import-field-mapping.jpg>

I agree, I don't like.

But how export - is there finally a chance to define the export line
delimiter CR, LF or CRLF?

One of the few things where I would expect a more windows friendly
approach on a Mac.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 2019-10-03 12:53:54 +0000, Martin Τrautmann said:

On Thu, 3 Oct 2019 12:30:44 +1300, Helpful Harry wrote:

Messy version from FileMaker Pro 18
<https://www.soliantconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/blog-fm-import-field-mapping.jpg>

I agree, I don't like.

But how export - is there finally a chance to define the export line delimiter CR, LF or CRLF?

One of the few things where I would expect a more windows friendly
approach on a Mac.

The Export Records window doesn't look like it has been changed
(another example of how messy and inconsistent version 18 is) - you can
still drag fields up and down to re-order them, etc.

I don't know about the CR / LF / CRLF. There is still the pop-up menu
for "Output file character set" with various options, including
"Windows (ANSI)", "ASCII (DOS), "Macintosh", etc., but I've never
needed to look into what the difference for those options is.


Helpful Harry :o)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Fri, 4 Oct 2019 08:22:56 +1300, Helpful Harry wrote:

I don't know about the CR / LF / CRLF. There is still the pop-up menu
for "Output file character set" with various options, including
"Windows (ANSI)", "ASCII (DOS), "Macintosh", etc., but I've never
needed to look into what the difference for those options is.

So propably nothing changed here.

FMP on Windows does export with CRLF.
FMP on Mac does export with CR only.

But Mac is based on some unixoid system from OSX on - and due to the
limited capabilities of FMP, I frequently do a "sort -u" or regex data conversion via the terminal or do an upload for other purposes and
exchange. Then Mac's CR is always some kind of extra trouble, where I
would prefer a choice to export with other EOL delimiters.

BTW, how about the import experience now. I usually do convert everthing
to tab delimited fields and do rename files to .txt or .tab.
Is there some better import function now where you can define how to
handle .csv. Not only the input character set (mainly windows, latin-1,
utf-9 and mac), but
* separated by comma, semicolon, tab, space, other
* string delimiter (such as ")
* fixed with
for real .csv handling?

Here I do use Libreoffice, which is rather suitable for that job.
I still hope for a copy/paste operation some day between filemaker's
table view and another table or spreadsheet from other applications.

- Martin

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 2019-10-03 20:29:37 +0000, Martin Τrautmann said:

On Fri, 4 Oct 2019 08:22:56 +1300, Helpful Harry wrote:

I don't know about the CR / LF / CRLF. There is still the pop-up menu
for "Output file character set" with various options, including
"Windows (ANSI)", "ASCII (DOS), "Macintosh", etc., but I've never
needed to look into what the difference for those options is.

So propably nothing changed here.

FMP on Windows does export with CRLF.
FMP on Mac does export with CR only.

But Mac is based on some unixoid system from OSX on - and due to the
limited capabilities of FMP, I frequently do a "sort -u" or regex data conversion via the terminal or do an upload for other purposes and
exchange. Then Mac's CR is always some kind of extra trouble, where I
would prefer a choice to export with other EOL delimiters.

BTW, how about the import experience now. I usually do convert everthing
to tab delimited fields and do rename files to .txt or .tab.
Is there some better import function now where you can define how to
handle .csv. Not only the input character set (mainly windows, latin-1,
utf-9 and mac), but
* separated by comma, semicolon, tab, space, other
* string delimiter (such as ")
* fixed with
for real .csv handling?

Here I do use Libreoffice, which is rather suitable for that job.
I still hope for a copy/paste operation some day between filemaker's
table view and another table or spreadsheet from other applications.

- Martin

I've only had to do the one import from an Excel spreadsheet so far,
but as the picture shows, there is a new "Import Options" section at
the bottom-left which may help you. It has options to let you define
the character set (same as the export window) and the field delimiter - depending on the import file type of course (it's disabled for Excel spreadsheets, for example).

<https://www.soliantconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/blog-fm-import-field-mapping.jpg>



Helpful Harry :o)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Fri, 4 Oct 2019 15:20:44 +1300, Helpful Harry wrote:

I've only had to do the one import from an Excel spreadsheet so far,
but as the picture shows, there is a new "Import Options" section at
the bottom-left which may help you. It has options to let you define
the character set (same as the export window) and the field delimiter - depending on the import file type of course (it's disabled for Excel spreadsheets, for example).

<https://www.soliantconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/blog-fm-import-field-mapping.jpg>

thanks, if it's more than tab, that's at least one improvement.

are you aware of the LibreOffice import dialog?

https://ibb.co/xG5ggdc

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 2019-10-04 07:12:38 +0000, Martin Τrautmann said:

On Fri, 4 Oct 2019 15:20:44 +1300, Helpful Harry wrote:

I've only had to do the one import from an Excel spreadsheet so far,
but as the picture shows, there is a new "Import Options" section at
the bottom-left which may help you. It has options to let you define
the character set (same as the export window) and the field delimiter -
depending on the import file type of course (it's disabled for Excel
spreadsheets, for example).

<https://www.soliantconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/blog-fm-import-field-mapping.jpg>

thanks, if it's more than tab, that's at least one improvement.

The pop-up menu has field delimiter options of tab, comma, semicolon,
and space, but there's also the "other" option underneath that pop-up
menu where you could potentially define almost any single character you
wanted (it let me paste in a return / carriage return character, but I
haven't tried a file using that as a field delimiter - it would cause
problems since you can't define a record delimiter).

are you aware of the LibreOffice import dialog?

https://ibb.co/xG5ggdc

No. I very occasionally use Libre Office to convert old ClarisWorks
documents, but that's all.


Helpful Harry :o)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)