Have you seen the movie Problemista yet? If not, it’s now streaming and ready for your viewing pleasure, so take a couple of hours out of your day and see why Tilda Swinton’s character, Elizabeth, is passionate about Claris FileMaker.
Tilda isn’t the only person fueled by FileMaker – welcome back guest blogger, Andrea de Fraga, business analyst at Codence, a Claris Platinum Partner. Andrea explains below why FileMaker reigns supreme over various spreadsheet tools.
Why it’s unsustainable to use spreadsheets.
I finally got to see Problemista, and honestly, the movie is too good for me to have beef with Julio Torres, the film’s writer and director. If you haven’t seen it, I'm sharing an IGN review to convince you. But don’t click on that link before I explain why trying to run a company on spreadsheets alone is unsustainable for so many businesses. I promise, the link is at the end of the blog.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a time and place for spreadsheets – I use them often myself. Getting a data dump in a spreadsheet and analyzing it with wizardry like pivot tables makes up 50% of my job. However, I never recommend that our clients collect, track, and communicate valuable information through spreadsheets alone.
Most companies start using spreadsheets because they have data that needs to be tracked, and many times, the information relates to running a business successfully. A spreadsheet is quick and easy to get started, but it can quickly become unwieldy and ultimately a barrier.
How spreadsheets waste your time.
Here’s a simple example. An events company wants to keep track of the events they implement. A go-getter intern starts a spreadsheet where she lists everyone invited to an event in one tab, how much money spent with all the vendors in another tab, and the event schedule in another tab.
It’s a wonderful spreadsheet, very organized, and everyone can easily see all the work that went in to planning the event within the three tabs.
The spreadsheet is so great an employee makes it a template and shares it so the staff can start using it for all their events. (That intern may get hired for this stroke of genius.) Pretty soon the team has all these robust spreadsheets for each event implemented over the last two years.
These spreadsheets work well when questions about individual events arise. Employees just open them up and search for answers. But what if someone wants to know how much was spent on cupcakes for all afternoon events within a specified date range?
Someone – maybe the go-getter intern – has to open up all the spreadsheets, figure out which were afternoon events, then look to see if there's a cupcake vendor associated with each event. After that research, she has to compile all of that information into yet another spreadsheet just to answer a simple question.
This isn’t order reigning supreme. It’s an overwhelming amount of work just keeping track of what spreadsheets were reviewed – a huge time suck.
The benefits of a FileMaker database.
If only someone at the organization had the foresight that FileMaker would have been a better tracking mechanism. The person researching the event would:
- Open one file.
- Make an inquiry: Show me all of last quarter’s events held in the afternoon that included cupcakes.
- Print – or more likely, run and email the report.
That’s because in a FileMaker database all those separate lists in the spreadsheets were turned into relational tables of information that became quick and easy to enter, query, and create a report.
Even in Problemista, a list is represented by a hot mess of scary chaos, and craigslist is personified by the most brilliant visual metaphor of recent cinematic history. And – you should take it as a warning – lists will eventually take you down a scary path of opening thousands of spreadsheets to answer a simple question.
If you have seen the movie, you’ll know that Alejandro’s boss tried to track the whereabouts of paintings created by Elizabeth’s cryogenically frozen husband – his egg art that’s very precious to her. While she could have listed information in spreadsheets, she wanted a more robust way of looking at her data.
As unhinged as her character may have been, she knew spreadsheets would never suffice for managing her beloved husband’s art.
One more relational database example.
Here's one more fun example. IMDb.com isn’t an internet movie list, because that would be crazy. It’s a database.
The reason IMDb works so well: It’s a relational database that connects all the people who work on movies with all of the movies and TV shows they work on. So, think of it as two main lists, the people and the shows. IMDb makes it easy for you to jump from a person to a show to another person on the show because in the middle of those two main lists, there are connectors that link it all together.
There’s no doubt IMDb is built on a super fancy platform that allows millions of users to access the information constantly. The company more than likely spent millions of dollars to build it, and they probably also make millions of dollars from it because everyone knows IMDb.
However, most organizations don’t have that kind of budget, and this is where FileMaker can be so helpful!
When it makes sense to work with a FileMaker expert.
FileMaker as a development tool is quick and somewhat easy to implement, giving you what’s needed to solve any business problem. It can even import data from all those spreadsheets if you happen to make the misguided decision to store your company’s information that way.
FileMaker also allows you to connect to other kinds of databases (SQL, ODBC) and plug in to dynamic data sources using APIs. Honestly, those connections can get tricky, and you may need some help.
Claris Partners are people who love helping businesses harness their data, and these experts certainly know a thing or two about FileMaker and building significant business solutions. Working with a partner can be cost-effective – not anywhere near what it cost to build IMDb.com.
If you want to do it yourself (DIY) with FileMaker, I encourage you to go for it – that's how I learned. See how I got started in my other FileMaker blog. Like any tool in the hands of a novice, after you create your first app, your end result may be something a little clunky and maybe a little crude.
But if you put that same clunky app in the hands of a FileMaker expert, you get something that’s tailor-made specifically for your organization – something as great as the database shown in Problemista!
Getting your key information out of spreadsheets and into relational databases can improve the business operations at almost any organization. And this, my friends, is how you get order reigning supreme.
As promised, here's IGN’s review of Problemista. Seriously, see the movie!
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Claris Partners, like Codence, have built their careers by creating custom applications tailored to business needs – developing unique solutions that positively impact the bottom line. Take Andrea’s advice and discover what a Claris Partner can do for your organization. Learn more.