Take the 2-minute tour ×

I've been trying for quite some time to migrate dozens of separate spreadsheets into a File Maker database.

(1) What is the best schema to implement?

(2) (Assuming we're going to use more than one table, which prevents using the regular import...) What is the best way to import all those spreadsheets?

For example, my spreadsheets look something like this:

  • EventA1 attendees
  • EventA2 attendees
  • EventB1 attendees
  • EventB2 attendees
  • etc.
  • List of people who wish not to receive mail

And we often have to send to A1, or A1+A2, or A1+A2+B1+B2, etc.

Here is the schema I've come up with so far, but I'm not 100% sure if it's appropriate. My biggest hold up is that I don't have a way to import my dozens of spreadsheets, since the built in import only works for one table.

My tentative schema

share|improve this question
add comment

1 Answer

Are you familiar with PHP, by chance? If so, you could write a script to import all of the data using FileMaker's PHP API (if you're running FileMaker server, that is.) This would allow you to add all data into FileMaker related tables accordingly and would be pretty quick and easy.

If you're not using FM Server or if you're not familiar with PHP then you will indeed need to rely on the basic import. In this case I would recommend separating your spreadsheets into separate files based on the tables they would be imported into.

For example, you could have 1 spreadsheet for the Contacts table, and import that by itself. Then you'd have another spreadsheet for the Name table, which would include the ContactID as a column. Import that on its own.

Follow this same procedure for all of your spreadsheets/tables and you'll end up with all data in FM related as expected.

If this isn't an option for you (or if you'd just rather do this) you could write a FileMaker script to loop through all of the records in the spreadsheet and add data to tables as necessary. This would be very similar to the PHP script method I mentioned, but it would happen directly within FileMaker using standard FM scripting techniques.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


