Underwhelmed by ‘easy’ PC database apps

FileMaker and Microsoft pitch their database applications at everyday PC users as "easy-to-use".

While there's little doubt the two programs are less complex and frightening than many alternatives, they aren't easy. At least not in the sense most of us understand the word.

I recently returned to the two programs after many years away from database programming. I discovered neither is entirely satisfactory. Although both are good in parts.

My project is simple. Take a look at my New Zealand media people on Twitter list. I wanted to take this list and turn it into a simple relational database where each name has one or more tags. So, for example, someone like myself who has worked as an editor and journalist in newspapers and magazines could be listed under all four tags and not in the existing nebulous group headings.

I'll report back on the exercise in more depth later. The short version of my foray into modern PC databases is as follows:

Easy Access

Microsoft Access 2007 was surprisingly easy to use. I pulled the html from my web site into Excel 2007 and exported the list directly into Access. Once there it took only a few hours to build a basic relational database.

A reprocessed version of my original list now appears online as  New Zealand media on Twitter – beta. The tagging still isn't perfect in this example, but the relational database aspect of the Access exercise went like clockwork. There were difficult moments looking things up in the extensive, but not always navigable online help. It doesn't help that Microsoft slips into its own personal language making it harder to extract help information than you'd expect.

Access lost the plot when it came to turning data into HTML.

If you looked at my example you'll notice there's a weird box around the table, the text TwitterAddresses Query and three column headings. These weren't optional. I could have removed them manually – but that's not the point. Getting the data out of Access and on my site was harder than expected.

FileMaker's dirty HTML

If anything, it's even harder to get clean HTML out of FileMaker Pro - although I have discovered workarounds. What I haven't yet found is an elegant way of making what is, after all, an extremely simple relational database work properly.

When you have two lists and want to marry them in a one-to-many relationship it should be straightforward, but after two days of playing around I still haven't found an elegant way of joining the two databases and creating social media-like tags.

Filemaker has a quirky way of allowing you to store multiple items in a single field as a return separated list, but converting this to a tidy HTML table isn't trivial.

So there you have it two "easy to use" databases that aren't that easy to use in practice.

I've had a few suggestions from people to dump Access and FileMaker for something like MySQL. This certainly makes sense from a web publishing point of view. It's a path I may yet travel down, but in the meantime I plan to persist with the popular applications for a while longer.