Why doesn't Apple's Numbers make .xls that Apple's Filemaker can read? #rant

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Filemaker 12 is finally in shape to do iOS prototyping, at least for me. As Apple’s OS-es, Filemaker has it’s particularities, and my+20 years with dBase, Paradox and SQL didn’t help me a lot. But ok. It also fun to crack the code of a new tool!

Doing development without data is not possible for me. So my initial prototyping is always on spreadsheets. So imagine my joy when I learned that I could start a Filemaker database with importing a spreadsheet. It had to be an excel spreadsheet however, but Numbers creates that, no? It does, and don’t!

Numbers create .xls (the old Excel fileformat) and Filemaker want .xlsx (the new Excel fileformat). Holy crap! But looking deeper I found I could use .xls and imported two spreadsheets. But the first, the chart of account, didn’t pass over the accounts.

So then to try .csf (a comma-separated textfile), that should be easy! But no. Numbers create .csv with “;” as delimiter (I have the Norwegian culture set), and Filemaker expect “,”, and thus merge the two fields.

So what I had to do is manually taking away, in each record, and delete the second field part...

I missed three hours on this stupidity! How can a company like Apple, that’s work to give us an integrated pleasant user experience, let this crap pass? Filemaker is however, a wholly owned Apple company too!

Suddenly I remember why I always hire a programmer…

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