FileMaker Bento 2 offers a spreadsheet feel, more app integration

Leaving beta for general availability this week, Bento 2 combines new spreadsheet functionality with iPhone data sync, iTunes-like search, and Leopard effects-based themes.

Less than a year after the beta of its first personal database for Mac, Apple's FileMaker has released Bento 2, an edition that adds features in two main areas: more integration with outside applications, and the addition of sophisticated spreadsheet-like functionality.

As previously reported in BetaNews, Bento is geared to helping consumers and business people manage and organize information that runs the gamut from contacts and calendars to projects and events, all without any database programming.

Bento runs only on Mac OS X Leopard, and you can customize the look and feel of your own Bento database through themes based on Leopard effects such as "waterfall."

At a Pepcom event in New York last November, where FileMaker introduced the beta of Bento 1, BetaNews saw how the initial edition allowed for imports of CVS files such as spreadsheets -- plus photos, for instance -- simply by dragging and dropping.

In the new Bento 2, users can import Bento 2 data directly into Excel and Numbers spreadsheets, in addition to exporting the data from those spreadsheets into Bento, said Beth Nagengast, product marketing manager for Bento 2, in a pre-briefing for BetaNews on a recent New York City press tour.

During a demo, Nagengast showed BetaNews how you can use spreadsheet-style "no set-up" data entry in Bento to modify records and change forms while remaining in the same mode. You can also view and edit table and detail records on a single screen through a new Split-Screen view. Support for tab-delimited files is new, too.

The reason behind the new spreadsheet functionality, the product manager said, is that so many of Bento's customers -- especially in the small business arena -- had long grown accustomed to working with data in Excel and Numbers prior to the software's initial commercial rollout early this year.

Also on the integration side, Bento 2 users can instantly link database elements such as records, contacts, and events to outside apps such as Apple Mail, Google Maps, online chat, and RSS feeds.

Since FileMaker has traditionally produced database software that runs across both Mac and Windows, are there any plans to move Bento in that direction? Nagengast wouldn't completely rule out the possibility, but she said there is certainly no immediate intention to do so.

That's because Bento is designed to work closely with OS X Leopard, and to take advantage of its capabilities, BetaNews was told. For example, Bento 2 adds iTunes-like searching, along with the ability to synchronize data with an iPhone and a Mac.

The Leopard effects are clearly one feature that wouldn't translate to the Windows side. In Bento 2, FileMaker adds ten new themes based on these effects, ranging from the blues of "Swimming Pool" to the browns of "Bookworm."

Like the first edition of Bento, Bento 2 is priced at $49. The new software runs on Mac OS X Leopard v. 10.5.4 on Mac computers with Intel, PowerPC G4, and PowerPC G5 processors.