Hi Guys,
In the coming weeks I'll be receiving my MacBook Pro and I'm intending to use this at work which is a *shock* Windows environment. Office:mac 2004 is a suitable replacement for the Windows Office 2003 applications with one major exception - MS Access. Now before people start recommending FileMaker I'd better note now that FileMaker seems damned expensive and mostly useful for producing database-backed applications. My requirements aren't so grand and I'm hoping that there is a more reasonable solution to my needs. Basically I use MS Access to analyse large datasets that are too big to go into Excel. Being able to relate tables of data together in Access is damned useful for being able to query the data that I am analysing. The data that I am working with is typically received in either Excel format or (particularly for datasets bigger than Excel's 65,000 record limit) text files with either fixed-width or comma separated data values. Are there any applications for the Mac that can be used to import this data and run queries on it, or am I going to be stuck with a choice of forking out for a FileMaker license or am I going to have to continue using Access through Parallels?
I don't much mind installing a database engine but I need a pretty easy way to get the data in, particularly if the data is coming from a fixed-width text file where I need to specify the positions of the data fields in the file.
Any suggestions or am I pretty much hosed on this one?
In the coming weeks I'll be receiving my MacBook Pro and I'm intending to use this at work which is a *shock* Windows environment. Office:mac 2004 is a suitable replacement for the Windows Office 2003 applications with one major exception - MS Access. Now before people start recommending FileMaker I'd better note now that FileMaker seems damned expensive and mostly useful for producing database-backed applications. My requirements aren't so grand and I'm hoping that there is a more reasonable solution to my needs. Basically I use MS Access to analyse large datasets that are too big to go into Excel. Being able to relate tables of data together in Access is damned useful for being able to query the data that I am analysing. The data that I am working with is typically received in either Excel format or (particularly for datasets bigger than Excel's 65,000 record limit) text files with either fixed-width or comma separated data values. Are there any applications for the Mac that can be used to import this data and run queries on it, or am I going to be stuck with a choice of forking out for a FileMaker license or am I going to have to continue using Access through Parallels?
I don't much mind installing a database engine but I need a pretty easy way to get the data in, particularly if the data is coming from a fixed-width text file where I need to specify the positions of the data fields in the file.
Any suggestions or am I pretty much hosed on this one?
