Bento Version 2.0v2— A powerful but simple to use database

Reviewed by Harry {doc} Babad © 2008

For a 30 day demo of this product click the Try It button on Bento’s website.

Cost: $49 USD List, $45 Street; £29.95, UK.

Languages: English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese

Documentation: A PDF formatted 100 Page, well illustrated and easy to use Users Guide is provide.dRequirements: Bento requires Mac OS X v10.5.4 Leopard and will not work with earlier versions of the Mac OS. A Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 867 MHz or faster processor 512MB of RAM; 1GB recommended. A CD drive is required for installation of boxed product software.

Users: All – Any one needing a personal or small business database that doesn’t require network accessibility.

Strengths: Too many to list, this is a vastly improved product.

Weaknesses: Ted Bade mentions its still lacks some printing options, which I don’t use or can work around.

Previous Reviews: Bento 1.0v2 - A FileMaker Pro Users Perspective by Harry {doc} Babad

Bento Version 1 by Ted Bade

Copyright Notice:Product and company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their respective companies.

The software was tested on my iMac 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM running Mac OS X Leopard version 10.5.5.

Introduction and Publishers Description

The new personal but significantly updated database from FileMaker, Inc. is claims it’s developer, as easy to use as a Mac. I agree. Bento organizes all your important information in one place, so you can manage your contacts, coordinate events, organize and track projects and events, prioritize tasks, and more — faster and easier than ever before. With Bento 2 you can organize just about every type of information you have and will need — all from one place.

This major new release has a smoothed out the interface, so it interacts much better with key Macintosh native utility applications such as Mail, iCal and the Address book. Not all such connectivity is new, but the integration is now easier, more strain free.

Note: There have been a number of posted complaints about such Mac-App integration, but they provided no details on the user’s system configuration.

Getting Started

The installation process and getting started are comparable to Bento 1, so I’ll skip all that. One expects, FileMaker, Inc., which is owned by Apple to get that sort of thing right –it did. I’m also not going to give you a play-by-play of the tests I ran; they were described in great detail in my earlier review. Suffice it to say the problems I had with the original version have disappeared. Whether it’s the upgrade or my greater familiarly with the product is a chicken and egg dilemma.

Review Perspective: I am one of the folks, my readers may remember, who use few, if any relational aspects that form the roots of the powerful FMP software. I also make little used of Apple’s address book and no use of Mail. I am a devout Eudora user, till future OS changes do us part. In essence, I repeated, taking advantage of some smartness pills I consumed (e.g., learning curve), testing the migration of my FMP files to Bento.

My individual active media plus FMP database documents, all in flat file formats, still include:

Addresses — (5 items that could be integrated) — Professional, Family & Friends, Our now closed Crafts Business Customers, Musicians & Craftsmen Contacts, and Stuff Suppliers.
Books — Science fiction & fantasy, Mystery & other fiction. I just started cataloging my large collection of cookbooks as a separate database. My music book library is likely next.
Media Collections — CD’s & DVD, Vinyl [LPs mostly but some 78s] as separate files. I had several years ago retired an extensive cassette collection, mostly home backups of my LPs.
Collectables — Fine art, Beanie Babies and other collectable goodies my wife loves.
Technical Document/Bibliographic Indices — A listing of documents on science and technology topics I’ve collected, and their locations. The records contain document abstract, biographical information, and key word listings

More Rambling’s on The Product

Overall Description of Bento Data Display Capabilities — “The data can be displayed in a table, spreadsheet style, or, more usefully, in a form view, which shows the data for a single record. You design the form by dragging and dropping individual fields, such as name and street address, where you want them. Each library or collection can have multiple forms, each showing a different aspect of the data. For example, you might have a view that shows the tasks associated with each team member and another that shows the team members linked to each task.”

Reference: From Stephen H. Wildstrom’ Tech and You column in the February 6, 2008 issue of Business Week Magazine.

More on Viewing Your Data — I was delighted to discover the new ways to view, enter and update information that make Bento even easier to use and customize. No its not FMP, but for most of my uses, cataloging information, FMP has long been overkill. The product’s excel-ability of both .xls and .xlsx data makes it easer to share information and to extract the information from FMP files. The product also works with Apple’s iWorks Numbers spreadsheets, a boon for the folks who prefer not to use MS Office. The so called views” seem comparable to the reports and views in FMP, are date subsets if you only what to spotlight a portion of your data set or to pass it on only the subset. These in Bento are called Collections.

Fields and More Fields — Bento 2 has more flexibly than in Bento 1, for both creation of fields and searching them. You can search numbers as text – addresses or zip codes – these allow no calculations, which of course makes sense. You can also deal with numbers and operating on them. For example a number such as money allows calculation, while dates and time have different sorting rules. Bento can also accommodate and search URL and eMail addresses placed in special fields that are easy to create. A unique feature of Bento is its ability to create a single field for an address that contains all the subfields you need to store a complete address (e.g., Street, City, State, Zip Code and Country.) I’ve not yet figured out how to do this in FMP.

Importing Spread Sheet Based Data - If you're working with lists in spreadsheets, it's relatively effortless to bring them into Bento for  iTunes-style searching, quick sorting and instant summary stats. This is important to me because I get much information in Excel format. For example, I recently got the results of a technical librarian’s in depth search for outstanding foreign nuclear scientists. I hate working in Excel – it is an alien creature compared to the search flexibility of non-number data that a database provides.

Creating New Databases — FileMaker Inc., on their website, lists 50 named database templates you can create. Those are built by customizing a dozen templates by adding or changing field names, descriptors, layouts, and as needed field type, to meet your needs. You can also, import template from databases created by friends and those being created by FileMaker Inc. and likely others.

Backing Up Your Data Files — I was impressed with this section of the users manual. Backing up your data is an oft forgotten task.

Discomforts

No apparent ability to password protect files – This is the only, to me, serious lack.
No label printing capability. I use MS Word to work around this weakness, but a direct solution would be helpful.
Lack of an upgrade price for Bento 1 users is disappointing. These are the folks who should be evangelists for the product. Such loyal users should be rewarded by reducing the price a shekel or three.
Auto formatting of new entered field leaves more white space than I’d like. I hate tweaking complex record formats in FMP, but least I can get the look I want.
I’d prefer standard semantics for items such as themes, templates, records, reports, and layouts (data views.) Some users will indeed have their needs expanded, and the “cutesy” terminology used by Bento developers will not serve them well when they update to a heavy-duty database like FMP or Oracle. Words like “library (database) or collection (report)” in lieu of database centric terms.

If Wishes Were Horses…

File Encryption- File Security - Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 128 Bit Encryption.

Conclusions

I‘m an experienced FMP and before that the now buried and long gone MS File user. Therefore, I am familiar with the vocabulary, underlying assumptions and operating modes that power a database. However, even if you're new to the Macintosh or to databases, it's never been easier to get organized thanks to ready-to-use templates and themes for personalized database construction designed by FileMaker’s developers and creative staff.

As noted in my Bento 1 review, having read the reviews and other information that both announced the updated version-Bento 2, I decided to again review the product from a FileMaker pro [FMP] user perspective by shifting information to Bento 2. I have long grudgingly kept up with FMP upgrades. This is not because I needed the newer features — I don’t. I was however trapped in the Macintosh OS update mode; an update or abandon your key applications upgrade do-loop. I am very glad I did!

The Future — Bento 2 comes a lot closer to my needs. It provides a clear path to transferring my data from FMP. Some of you might say my hesitation is not about the actual product, but rather with a lack of time to make the transition to Bento. After all, I am licensed for FMP, and of course familiar with it. All it would likely take to push me over would be the addition of strong encrypted file protection. All it would likely take to push me over would be the addition of strong encrypted file protection for my household financial records

Recommendation

Bento 2 begins to fill a serious need for a Macintosh entry-level database. Although not perfect, by flat file database standards (e.g., the early versions of FileMaker) it is such a vast improvement that it is a delight to rate it more highly than version 1.

In many ways, all positive, Bento is to FileMaker Pro as Photoshop Elements is to Photoshop. It’s a great buy for a full-featured piece of software at less then a fourth of the price. Like me, there are many FMP users for whom that sophisticated and powerful program are overkill. As is the price, for home or small business users, the products flexibility and ease of use make it well worth $50. It fully deserves a 4.5 macC rating.

I agree with Applelinks’ Gary Coyne…“As a FileMaker Pro user, I would prefer to have FileMaker, Inc. provide a simple flat file FileMaker application and sell it for $80-100.” No new vocabulary and all the features I loved and still know to use from the earlier versions, but of course totally Leopard compatible.

There are fewer illustration is this review than is usual because most of the improvements in version 2 are under the hood, invisible to uses.

In addition, some of the negative reviews on this product focus on lack of an upgrade price. For software priced in the hundreds of dollars, upgrade offers are traditional. For $50 software packages undergoing major updates, it a loss leader an unreasonable demand even before these troubled times.

Doc.