Replacement for FileMaker

[rkheadl]

I was ready to upgrade to a newer version of Filemaker, but then I saw the price. I'm wondering if Open Office can replace Filemaker for me. I'm especially wondering if I can open a Filemaker database in Open Office.

[Villeroy]

Base is not a replacement for a fully blown development suite. No, it can not open any database at all. It may be able to connect to your tables through odbc or jdbc

[keme]

It looks like ODBC drivers can be freely downloaded from Claris. With that, you can install your Filemaker developed resources as ODBC data sources on your system, and connect Base (or other software with DB client functionality) to those sources.

• I do not know whether you get full functionality without further licensing. A functional but limited "trial version" is not uncommon, though I cannot see any statement towards such a limitation for the Filemaker ODBC driver.
• You should expect to reach all your DB-stored data and utilize linking/dependencies, and possibly also see/use queries/views
• Forms, menus and other framework components are most likely not available to Base.

[Villeroy]

It looks like ODBC drivers can be freely downloaded from Claris.

Which makes perfect sense when you have an office suite on one hand and a Filemaker database on the other hand and you need a connection between both resources to create serial letters, labels, feed your calculation models etc. Mail merge is what >90% of all Base documents do. Most of these mail merges are connections to some spreadsheet. Although you can do much more sophisticated things with Base, you must not compare it with MS Access nor Filemaker.