Data Organizing Solution Needed

October 15, 2005 5:50 PM

We're looking for a way to keep track of employees, clients, suppliers. Ideally, I'd be able to link to reference files (images, PDFs, spreadsheets) on the hard drive, print compact lists of entries, labels for contacts, and so on.

We're running Mac OS X Panther 10.3.9 on fairly modern hardware.

posted by evil holiday magic to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

roll your own system in Filemaker.
posted by sfz at 6:48 PM on October 15, 2005

Response by poster: Can Filemaker link to other files on the hard drive?
posted by evil holiday magic at 6:52 PM on October 15, 2005

sure - you can either use their "container" fields which can store files as a reference to a location on the hard drive, or you can use plugins to create a "select file" interface and store the location as a text string.
posted by sfz at 6:58 PM on October 15, 2005

ACT!. Make sure you avoid version 2005.
posted by schnee at 2:55 PM on October 16, 2005

This sounds like a job for FileMaker 8. Check out the Small Business section of the FileMaker website. Add that to the "Roll your own" solution and you're all set.
posted by sarahnade at 5:43 PM on October 16, 2005

Response by poster: Re: ACT!

I only see the product for Windows and Palm, not Mac.

Do you have any leads on books or tutorials that would help me get into FM Pro?

This should be another question, but what about digital asset management? We download the same stock photos constantly, because there's no way to keep track of them locally, and search them, the same way we can on the stock photo site. We don't have time to meticulously enter metadata for each item, unfortunately.
posted by evil holiday magic at 8:35 PM on October 16, 2005