Bento

List Price: $49.00 Discount Price: $40.98

Features:

• Organize all the details of your busy life in one place
• Manage contacts, coordinate events, track projects, and prioritize tasks faster and easier than ever before
• Links with Mac OS X Address Book and iCal; Imports spreadsheets and other CSV files
• Includes ready-to-use templates, and elegant themes designed by Mac artists
• Just point and click or drag and drop to change the look of any form and see information in a way that makes sense to you

Customer Reviews:

Bento - a great solution [Posted on 2008-05-27]
Bento ended up being the perfect datbase solution for my work situation. I'd been looking for one since the discontuance of Apple Works and everything was either too complicated or too expensive or both.

Bento is inexpensive, complete at least for my level of need and fairly inuitive. Once I got the hang of it importing from a spreadsheet database in CSV format was simple an deasy. Definitely woth a shot. Especialy as you can down load a 30 day trial version.

Nice product but still a limited 1.0  [Posted on 2008-05-29]
I like this product overall. It is easy to use and can do some nice things for simple form based databases. It has nice integration features if you use the ilife tools like contacts lists, etc, but since I honestly don't use the calendar or address book so that doesn't help me.

I used it for some simple tracking DBs, etc. It doesn't to a ton more then a spreadsheet does for that, honestly, except give a nice form interface.

I still like it overall but it needs some beefing up to be a great product.

Bento, very useful and easy to use [Posted on 2008-06-20]
Bento is of course, Filemaker light. It automatically picks up and creates a bidirectional data base with the information in your Mac address book program. Bidirectional because changes in either one automatically updates the other. I imported information from an Excel sheet with little effort. The excel sheet had to be saved as .csv. That's what I've done with it. The program places the information in a default template and has a variety of other templates that gives the information a professional look. It also allows table view with a single button click.

Far from perfect, but it's pretty darn good [Posted on 2008-07-14]
Let's start with what Bento is not. Bento is not the end all be all database program. I deal with and have dealt with some of the biggest and baddest at the enterprise level such as: Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, and Informix to name a few. So, I really understand what a database should be.

Face it, Bento was made to make databases easy for most users. And on that front, I think it succeeds, and that is why I wanted to get a copy. I wanted a very basic and user friendly database program. And, I thought, if it was easy enough, I would get around to doing some projects that I had put off because I didn't want to devote a huge amount of time completing.

Project 1: I track my work time on a daily basis. For years, I have been doing this in Excel. I knew that moving to a database program would be better but just didn't have the time. After Bento arrived, I jumped in and was able to convert my time tracking to Bento. Now for the downside, there is no reporting capabilities which is a problem when you are wanting to analyze your time. So, I did have to create an export from Bento to load into Excel so that I could do pivot tables. Once I got this set-up, the ongoing updates are easy, breezy. I just export from Bento, go to Excel, refresh the data and then refresh the pivot table. Really, it is just a matter of a few seconds to see the latest and greatest.

Project 2: I had done a bad job of maintaining a home inventory. Bento has a standard template for a home inventory that I just made some minor tweaks to and off I went. I am doing a much better job of keeping track of things and knowing what we have.

Project 3: Expense tracking was also in Excel. I converted it over to Bento and it is in a much more user friendly format now.

Project 4: I wanted to create a project tracking database. So, if I got a call from someone wanting to know the latest and greatest, I could open the page for the project and give a quick run down.

On the downside, I wish there was a better library of templates available. I had to build some things from scratch because there was simply nothing that was even close to what I was seeking. But, since Bento is new, it will take some time for those to appear.

Bottomline - I use Bento just about every day. I have integrated it into my tracking really pretty easily. I use several software packages, and I didn't think that Bento was very hard to pick-up. It seemed pretty intuitive. If you have been through the Office 2007 switch on PCs, I can promise that event was more painful that picking up a copy of Bento. If you don't think in terms of how to organize using a database structure, the built-in templates should be a big help. Once you look at those, it is pretty easy to make some changes if you want just another field to drop one that you will not use.

Limited [Posted on 2008-07-18]
DO NOT plan on entering a database of substance. Bento has its limits and when you hit it, in my situation is was 1280 entries you are dead in the water. Bento is for light and very basic use. It is not for those that need more than entering a few household items. I am very disappointed with the software and their support.

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