Andrew

To follow up what other people have written, I'd just like to add that by carefully converting your .fp5 files to .fp7 (follow Filemaker's suggested procedure), your three files should continue to operate MOSTLY as they did before. You should not have to struggle tremendously to get the system to work in FMP11.

That said, you will (i) find problems with some functionality, because certain Filemaker functions operate somewhat differently in FMP11 than in FMP6 and (ii) be well advised to begin altering your schema (after conversion) to take advantage of the great simplification that FMP11 allows. One area of change that might be affecting your quite seriously, given your use of many similar files in different folders, is that file references (to external files used for lookups, etc.) are no longer hidden within a file but available for editing.

We don't know your level of Filemaker skills, but I'm guessing neither you nor anyone else in the business is a professional developer. It sounds like you have learned just enough to get your solution working. If that's the case, I think your first step should be to convert your three files for 'this' year as well as any previous years' files that they rely on for lookups. That should be enough to get the basic system working. You can then check for any particular functions that are failing and correct those.

The alternative would be to simply start again in the new .fp7 paradigm; build a new (and much improved!) database and import any necessary reference data from previous years.

Incidentally, well done for keeping a .fp5 database running all this time! Filemaker does seem to lend itself to such long-term usage even though hardware changes so rapidly. As you are finding, though, that has both upside and downside. The upside is that you've probably run a very economical database system for many years. The downside is that you now have rather a steep re-learning curve!

HTH

Steve

 
On 6 Jun 2011, at 00:26, Andrew Gordon wrote:

> This worked fine in FMP 6 and earlier but we are having difficulty setting up the same in FMP11 "regular".