A friend of mine runs a market research company and has all her data stored in FileMaker 6. She has recently bought a new computer running Windows 7 and discovered that she can't run FM6. She's now bought FM11, and she needs to know what she has to do to get her data up and running in the new version. I'm familiar with Access, but have never used FM so I don't know what to advise.

Your friend is probably in on of the easiest positions for a move from early version of FMP to current.

NOTE: She can purchase FMP 11 for a net price under $149 if she also purchases one of the new FM Go products from the iTunes store. This offer was valid until June 17th in the US. I am not certain of purchases outside of the US.

She could also download the free 30 day trial of FMP 11 to her new computer.

Simply get FMP 11 up and running on the new computer and send the FMP 6 formatted files to the new computer across a network, via email, etc. FMP 11 will convert the old formatted files to the new extension of "fp7" and open the revised file.

The updated User is in for quite a "version shock". There are multiple improvements in Filemaker from a variety of standpoints since the v6.

Please NOTE!! Leave the current FMP v6 files intact until the conversion is complete and the User is satisfied with the results. There may be minor intricacies in script steps, named relationships, and a calculation or two that need to undergo troubleshooting. If the results are good using the Trial version then a purchase as described above would be all that is necessary to obtain a new User key for FMP 11.

Since you or the new computer owner are likely to ask..... There is no upgrade path from v6 to the current v11. That option expired almost a year ago for old version Users.

We still come across an older FMP file from time to time and have little problem with upgrade to current versions. There may be some reformatting of cosmetics in the layouts since screen real estate has changed somewhat, but the new features of 11 (actually those introduced since 8+) are well worth the investment of time and money.

Good luck.

Many thanks - that's most helpful.

I agree that buying FM 11 and upgrading is easy because you probably won't have to do anything to the database to make it work in 11.

However, there are a ton of new features that you probably will want to take advantage of. Starting with version 7, FM finally became a true relational database and added the power of connecting to SQL databases too via ODBC. Also, version 6 of FM had every table as a different file while in 7+, a file can have as many tables as you want. It is also nice for security purposes to have a single file with one set of login credentials. Or better yet, FM 7+ also supports Active Directory authentication too.

FileMaker is both a reporting tool and a database hosting tool. Access is primarily a reporting tool and Microsoft strongly recommends not using it to host production data. Instead they want you to use Microsoft SQL Server. However, in a weird twist, since FileMaker is its own database hosting program, you can use Access to call data from FileMaker to make Access reports from a FileMaker database via ODBC connection. Always interesting - haha.

FileMaker 6 came out in 2002 and a lot has improved a lot since version 6 as have most other database tools including Access. So it should be easy to make some significant improvements if they want to further develop things.