Free Office 98-FileMaker Pro Importer from Microsoft -- Microsoft has released a free Office 98-FileMaker Pro Importer that enables users of Word 98 or Excel 98 to integrate information from FileMaker Pro databases directly into Word and Excel documents. (See Matt Neuburg's reviews of Word 98 and Excel 98 in TidBITS.) The importer, written in Office's Visual Basic for Applications and communicating with FileMaker via AppleScript, adds new commands to Word's and Excel's menus. These commands enable Office 98 users to access data from FileMaker databases to perform mail merges in Word 98 or to use Excel 98's PivotTable or charting capabilities. The importer is geared toward smaller databases; users with large amounts of data will still be better off exporting from FileMaker in a text-only format, then opening and manipulating the exported files directly in Office 98. To use the Office 98-FileMaker Pro Importer, users need FileMaker Pro 3.x or 4.x, Microsoft Office 98, and enough memory to run both FileMaker and the appropriate Office 98 applications simultaneously. Microsoft also recommends using the importer with Mac OS 8.5 or higher, since the Mac OS 8.5's PowerPC-native AppleScript significantly improves the importer's performance. The Office 98-FileMaker Pro Importer is a 475K download. [GD]

<http://www.microsoft.com/macoffice/fmtools.htm>
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