Product Description

Bento organizes all your important information in one place, so you can manage your contacts, coordinate events, track projects, prioritize tasks, and more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1134 in Software
• Brand: Filemaker Inc.
• Model: TP934LLA
• Released on: 2008-01-08
• Platform: Macintosh
• Format: CD-ROM
• Dimensions: .15 pounds

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

Amazon.com
Meet Bento, the new personal database from FileMaker that's as easy to use as your Mac. It organizes all the details of your busy life in one place. So you can manage contacts, coordinate events, track projects, and prioritize tasks faster and easier than ever before.

Manage contacts, coordinate events, track projects, and prioritize tasks faster and easier than ever before.

Substance, meet style
It's never been easier to get organized thanks to built-in links with Mac OS X Address Book and iCal, ready-to-use templates, and elegant themes designed by Mac artists.

Built-in Links to Address Book and iCal
There's no need to re-enter all your contact and calendar info to get started with Bento. It has built-in links to your Mac OS X Address Book and iCal applications.

In seconds, you'll be viewing all your contacts, tasks, and events in beautiful Bento templates that make searching, sorting and organizing simpler and faster than ever before.

Great-looking templates
Bento also comes with more than 20 ready-to-use templates. So you can easily get started organizing just about any kind of information you have--for work, home, school or community projects.

Add beautiful themes with a click
To make your templates look even better, you can add an elegant theme, designed by Mac artists, that suits your style and personality. Themes include coordinated colors, layouts, fonts and text styles that bring style to your templates with a single click.

Help stop spreadsheet abuse
Let your spreadsheet crunch the numbers, and let Bento do the rest.

If you're managing lists in Microsoft Excel or just about any other program that exports to Comma Separated Values, you can import them with a simple drag and drop.

Bento makes it possible to connect related information together so you can see a more a complete picture of everything you're tracking--all in one place.

Bring it together
From contacts and calendars, to projects and events, you can organize just about every type of information you have--and access it instantly--all from one place.

Get the big picture
Bento makes it possible to connect related information together so you can see a more a complete picture of everything you're tracking--all in one place.

Bringing things together to get you organized--that's what Bento is all about.

Find what you need fast
Ever search for music with iTunes? It couldn't get much easier. And Bento carries on the Mac tradition by using familiar iTunes-like searching. You can find the things you store in Bento instantly. From phone numbers for friends in Fiji to deadlines due in December.

Display your information in a familiar spreadsheet-like Table View to see multiple records at once.

Switch to Form View to see one record at a time.

What's your type?
Because Bento is a flexible database, you're not forced into tracking pre-set types of information. You can store virtually any type of information you want in Bento choosing from a variety of field type options.

For instance, let's say you're putting on your company party and all your contacts are already stored in the Mac Address Book. You could simply add a "Checkbox" to your Address Book form to track who's coming, and add a "Choice" pop-up list to store each person's food preference. It's that easy!

See things your way
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.

Set the table, and sort it, too
Display your information in a familiar spreadsheet-like Table View to see multiple records at once. Sort columns with a single click, and get quick stats through the handy Summary Row.

If you use the Mac OS X Address Book, you'll appreciate this new view, because you'll be able to see many contacts all at once.

Forms flow freely
Switch to Form View to see one record at a time. This view is especially useful when entering large amounts of text, like notes from lectures, meetings and conversations.

You can also view different slices of your information by adding as many new forms as you'd like. And each new form can show a different grouping of information, so you can see your data from every angle.

Customize with a click
Resize, rearrange, and regroup to your heart's content. Just point and click to change themes, columns displayed, label positions, text sizes, shading, alignment, and more.

Customer Reviews

Broken and no plans to fix it
THere are some serious flaws with this product. When I contacted Filemaker who developed Bento I was told that only bugs that cause data loss will be fixed. I have to live with the other issues or buy v2 which also has bugs that will not be fixed per this policy. Don't believe me? Check out their own web forums.

read user comments before you buy
There are a ton of reviews for this product on the web, try to filter our the marketing plants and the irate users. I purchased Bento from amazon and here are my thoughts on both usability and the now infamous Filemaker policy regarding NO upgrades.

The best thing about Bento is that their intention was to make a VERY simple database "oriented" product that looks great. There really is a niche for this product and assuming you can find ways to make it your own then it has value. The greatest strength is its greatest weakness and that is why most people who critique this product find it too crippled for their use. Through tweaking the guts of the program I was able to make it useful for me but it IS a very elementary piece of software.

So should you buy it? I have reviewed the upgrade to Bento 2 and still find little different from Bento 1 to change my review in the previous paragraph. This certainly is not a full upgrade from 1 to 2 and still can disappoint many a buyer. I have hopes that this will become a mature product but I fear that it will not. To me the issue lies in the attitude of Filemaker as they are not looking at this software as a long term project.

Based on the research I have done they have either made a major marketing blunder in alienating their core users or they are simply taking a short sighted view on who will buy their product (ie one-time buyers who care little about the long term use of the product.) I myself will wait for Bento 4 (which in Filemaker timelines may be released within the year :)

Unacceptably slow, surprisingly awkward, feeble capabilities
Bento version 2 has gotten some good reviews.

I can't explain that.

In my testing it's a toy application.

I have a large iCal database with about 6,000 events living on a G5 iMac running OS X 10.5.5. This is a relatively large event collection (though it would not stress Outlook at all) and my hardware is dated -- so I expected a few performance issues.

I did not expect dreadful performance. Minutes to open the Bento (SQLite really) database. A minute to add a single event record. Inability to add a record when viewing a query (filtered list). No drop down for calendar names ...

If you've used any database you'll be surprised to learn you can't emulate a join; you can't find common names in two lists for example.

This is a toy application that will only work with small data sets on a modern machine.

It's awful. Filemaker should be ashamed.