Hi,

I'm new to filemaker and was hired to correct some problems for a small companies filemaker 9 DB.

They have one table with 472 fields, I need to break this up into a relational structure and I'm fairly sure that many of the fields are not in use.

I tried to create a layout with all the fields but when I switch to table view it will not display all 472 fields. Is this normal?

If I can't view all the fields, I will need to export into access. I think the procedure is export to .dbf file then import dbase 5 to access. Is this correct? I've also read the field names must be less than 10 chars. Is there anything else I should know about exporting?

Thanks
John

One thing to note is that Access has a 256 field limit per table...
http://sqlserver2000.databases.aspfa...-and-msde.html

Your right. I just tried and it stopped at 255.

I can't remember what it is, but with FileMaker, there's a limit to the number of fields that can be displayed in Table View. There can still be more fields in the table, just not accessible on a Table View.

You might break up your fields into different layouts consisting of groups of fields based on function.

Maybe table view limitations are based on field lengths, but I've had it start dropping fields after only 64 fields. I just use Form or List view layouts and I have never run into limits even with hundreds of fields. Of course, table view sure was convenient and fast and it would be nice if FileMaker would fix that minor issue. But I only use table view as a quick view of a table anyway and not as a real report.

By the way... I hate cleaning up some huge flat database where people chaotically added fields. But this happens a lot with older FileMaker databases that started before version 7 when FileMaker was not relational.