VISUAL QUICKPRO GUIDE FileMaker Pro 7 Advanced FOR WINDOWS AND MACINTOSH [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Import from Excel Ranges

There are a multitude of situations in which you need only a specific portion of a spreadsheet as FileMaker data. When you bring in the entire spreadsheet, you have to match fields, delete extra information, and clean up the data. That's a lot of extra work, and it's completely unnecessary. If you've been clever in Excel and named ranges for printing reports or for organizing data, FileMaker will recognize these ranges and allow you to import one range at a time.

To import data ranges from Excel

1 .Choose File > Import Records > File (to insert data in a existing table) or File > Open (to create a new database).

2 .When the Open File dialog box appears, select the Excel file containing named ranges that you want to import.

3 .When the Specify Excel Data dialog box appears, click the "Display named ranges" radio button (Figure 11.52).

4 .Click the name of the range to be imported. Click OK.

5 .In the First Row Option dialog box, click the button to indicate whether the first row of the range contains field names or data (Figure 11.53). If you're creating a new file and choose Data, the Name Converted File dialog box will appear. Name the file and click Save.

The Excel spreadsheet columns will automatically be converted to fields named F1 through FN, which you can rename in the Define Fields dialog box.

6 .

If you're creating a new file and choose "Field names" in the First Row Option dialog box, or if you're importing into an existing database file, the Import Field Mapping dialog box will appear.

7 .In the Import Field Mapping dialog box, match up the data from the Excel file on the left with the existing field names on the right.

8 .

In the Import Action section in the lower left, choose whether the imported data will add new records or replace or update existing records. Click Import (Figure 11.54).

Tips

If you're using Excel, you'll import your data with Excel's import wizard. Look at the data in the wizard to see if any of the fields is a Zip code. If so, use the wizard to set that field to text format or else Excel will strip the leading zeroes when you import.

Dragging a file onto the FileMaker icon will create a new database file. To import into a table in a multitable database, you must use the import command.