I work in a research lab and I'm building a new filemaker pro advanced 11 database to hold our study data.

The variables that this database stores will occasionally be exported into excel documents and merged with exported data sets from another database.

Unfortunately, the person who built the first database (the source of the "other" data sets) didn't use attribute/column names that meant anything. Furthermore, many of them are actually mis-named.

I want to change the column names in my database so that they follow standard naming conventions but need to be able to export the data with column names that follow the "bad" naming conventions used in the previous database.

Is this possible? can I use some sort of massive lookup table in Filemaker to change the column names as they are exported? How would I do this? How difficult would this be?

Am I better off just using the terrible names from the original database?

thanks so much