I can’t speak for Brendan, but while I agree that feature would be *great*, I believe the problem is with Apple. This was a signature feature of the original Bento, and FileMaker eventually had to remove it because even they (as a subsidiary of Apple!) could no longer make it work because of how Address Book (now Contacts) handled syncing. I don’t know enough to describe the issue in detail, but what I gleaned was that contact records have no enduring id that other apps can depend on. So: no link, no sync!
Also:
Please could someone help.
We have converted Bento 3 to Bento 4 [warning time limited software].
Exported to template, and ticked box to export records.
Photos have been imported BUT NOT text files e.g. WORD.doc and PAGES that were linked in previous Bento database.
Please advise how to migrate the links to these text documents. Thank you.
We have begun to set up the TapForm database but much of my Bento material (some 700 records including .docs, jpgs etc.) has not come across properly.
I am rapidly becoming very disillusioned with the new system, but *hope* we may yet make it work.
Does anyone know how to IMPORT the attached documents and urls, please. And how to get rid of all the strings of hashtags where there should be text.
I absolutely loved Bento, and would really like to get over this hump.
Thank you.
P.S. Wondering why there doesn’t seem to be a TapForms dedicated help(phone)line …
Hi Cliff,
Ya, I’ve seen all kinds of issues with Bento running on OS X 10.11. It very often just hangs up or crashes. So I keep Parallels and OS X 10.9 so that I can still run it.
Thanks,
Brendan
David, I’m glad you got it to work.
Brendan, I noticed you mentioned that you run Bento on a virtual machine with OS X 10.9. I still have Bento 4 installed on my Mac running OS X 10.11, and it seems to work fine, at least as far as opening the database and exporting records and templates. Is there some incompatibility with OS X >= 10.10 that I am unaware of? I don’t add any new data to Bento, but I have occasionally brought over libraries into Tap Forms if I needed to update them.
Thank you, all, for this advice. In the end I dumped everything into Excel, output to csv, then imported using the old Bento template. Most things are there — so I need to tidy up at the edges.
For the record we were still on Bento 3. I was reluctant to update 3 to 4 with your link above in case I lost everything.
Well, that being the case, I’d say to any Bento users (pre version 4) that they should get the demo, export templates with data for all their libraries, and get it all running in Tap Forms! Don’t cling to Bento any longer. As Bones would say, “It’s dead, Jim.”
Well, the problem with version 4 from the link above is it’s just a 30 day demo. So no, they don’t exactly let you upgrade. It’s just the demo version that can upgrade your 3.0 Bento database. I don’t know what would happen to your database after the demo expired. Fortunately I have a valid license that I’m able to run inside of Parallels running on OS X 10.9, so I can help customers convert their .bentodb files into .bentoTemplate files if they send me the .bentodb file.
Oh that’s cool, Brendan. I didn’t realize FileMaker was decent enough to let Bento users update to the last version even if they hadn’t bought it. A nice gesture after cutting us all loose! Anyway, I’m glad I ended up with Tap Forms, so Bento’s demise was not as bad as it seemed at first.
Right, the Export Records option only appeared in Bento 4. Here’s a link to download the Bento 4 update which should have this:
http://help.filemaker.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/11182
Thanks,
Brendan
Possibly you don’t have the include records in template option if you don’t have the latest version of Bento. I think they added that in a later version. If you don’t have that, then you will have to export the records as text and import records in Tap Forms.
Yes, there is. You want to export to Bento’s template format. In the Export dialog, it’s the right-most option for me, along the top. There’s a box of “related libraries” you can select, if there are any (do), and underneath is the “Include records in template” checkbox.
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When you exported the template from Bento, did you check the box “Include records in template”? If you did that, Tap Forms should automatically import the data, I believe.
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TapForms can’t import a “raw” Bento database file. You have to Export from Bento and then Import into TapForms.
For very simple isolated forms, you can just export from Bento as a CSV and import that into TapForms. But it’s best to — and for anything complex you need to — export from Bento as a “template”, including all the data, and then use File > Import Bento Template … to import that template into TapForms.
It worked great for most of my Bento data.
The only problem I had was that I’d used Bento Simple Lists for several critical databases to record multiple values; and TapForms can’t import those. After a lot of experimentation and exchanging information on this forum, I worked out a Python script to massage the Bento export into a form that TapForms could handle. It was a messy multi-step process, but it only had to be done once for each of the forms, and then I was blissfully free of Bento.
Welcome to the Light Side, Padawan.
I would like to Migrate from Bento. I have managed to install the template … but how to I import the data? This seems to be contained in:
bento.bentodb
I would be very grateful for some guidance on this.
