This simple database keeps track of clients for a pet spa. FileMaker’s built-in number crunching and word processing tools let you track people, processes, and things, creating all your reports, correspondence, and collateral documents along the way. You can use it like a business card file to store and retrieve customer information, or run your entire business with one program. That list of associates in California you took hours to generate from a card file? A computer can do it in less than a second.įigure 1. FileMaker Pro lets you do just about anything with the information you give it. Computers make searching databases a whole lot faster. But since it’s stored on a computer, you can organize the same information in numerous ways with ease-say, by name or by state. It contains lots of information, like addresses, Zip codes, and phone numbers, and it organizes that info in useful ways (see Figure 1 for an example). In theory, anyway, a digital database isn’t much different from one collected on business cards.

Digital databases help you avoid that kind of tedium.Ī database program like FileMaker Pro helps you build a database so you can store information and then see that information the way you need to see it. What if you want to get a list of all your associates in California? Your card file isn’t organized by state, so you have to flip through every card, one by one, to create a list. Such physical databases have major limitations compared with their digital cousins. You can find any person’s card because you know where in the alphabet to look, even though there may be thousands of cards to look through. For example, a business card file has information about people organized alphabetically by name. Ideally, the information in a database is organized so you can find what you’re looking for quickly and easily. In fact, if you look up the word “database” in a dictionary (which is a database, too), you’ll find that a database is just a collection of information, or data. But databases have been around much longer than computers-a phone book, a cookbook, and an encyclopedia are all databases.

It calls to mind images of whirring computers, advanced degrees, and pocket protectors.

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