Data base problem on Mac

[Ferretfancy]

I've always used an iMac, and I'm currently running Snow Leopard. Back in 1997, with my first iMac I began to build a database using Apple's Appleworks 6, and after upgrading a couple of times I still use it. It's a very large database catalogue of my entire music collection, everything nicely cross referenced, running to thousands of entries,
Here's the problem, Apple no longer recognises Appleworks 6, so if I wish to upgrade my system beyond Snow Leopard I will be unable to access all that mass of information.
At the moment, everything works fine, but the computer is a few years old and won't last forever, and I dread having to do all that data entry again!

Is there some software out there which will be enable me to read Appleworks 6 and store it in a readable form on any new iMac?

I could of course simply soldier on, buy a new computer and banish my old Mac and database to the back room. Oddly,it's only the database facility that will not be recognised by any new machine that I buy, everything else in Appleworks 6 can be read as a Pages document.

It really is unforgivable that Apple don't seem to believe in back compatability, any suggestions would be very welcome.

[Don Petter]

I'm not familiar with your Mac world, but I would have thought that, in general, all good databases would allow output to, and input from, some standard text format such as comma delimited fields.

Thus you would write out all your basic data records into a large file, and then read this into your new database (having first set this up with the exact required fields in the right order, of course).

[amateur51]

Oh dear twice in one week my belief in the apparent infallibility of Macs has been shaken.

First it was the security problems after years of being sniggered at as I started each day with a security clean-up on my PC.

Now it's Database problems.

As they sing in the musical Chicago ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvSLmO82UCw

[MrGongGong]

Have you looked through these forums ?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4938363

[amateur51]

Have you looked through these forums ?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4938363

Is this a sly hint that you want Bbm to set them to music for a 14-piece brass ensemble?

[Dave2002]

I've always used an iMac, and I'm currently running Snow Leopard. Back in 1997, with my first iMac I began to build a database using Apple's Appleworks 6, and after upgrading a couple of times I still use it. It's a very large database catalogue of my entire music collection, everything nicely cross referenced, running to thousands of entries,
Here's the problem, Apple no longer recognises Appleworks 6, so if I wish to upgrade my system beyond Snow Leopard I will be unable to access all that mass of information.
At the moment, everything works fine, but the computer is a few years old and won't last forever, and I dread having to do all that data entry again!

Is there some software out there which will be enable me to read Appleworks 6 and store it in a readable form on any new iMac?

I could of course simply soldier on, buy a new computer and banish my old Mac and database to the back room. Oddly,it's only the database facility that will not be recognised by any new machine that I buy, everything else in Appleworks 6 can be read as a Pages document.

It really is unforgivable that Apple don't seem to believe in back compatability, any suggestions would be very welcome.

Do you have the Snow Leopard disc? If so, then you could try running this - http://www.parallels.com/uk/landingp...FVDKtAodalYASQ - on top of the latest OS, or the next version or two, when the OS itself is updated. You'd need more memory probably to make it work reasonably well, but I see no reason why it shouldn't work.

It is interesting to see this comment about the software. I personally really regret that the drawing package hasn't been retained and upgraded by Apple, as whatever its faults, I came to the conclusion that it was much better than almost all the rival packages for my purposes, and I still use it on a machine which I've not upgraded. There are some packages which claim to be compatible, but in my experience they aren't really.

There was also a version which ran on Windows XP - whether that would work on a new Windows machine I'm not sure - it probably would, though it had more bugs than the Apple Mac version.

[Frances_iom]

my memory (confirmed I think by wikipaedia) is that the later version of appleworks was transformed into Claris's filemaker - I know many years ago I used version 4 on both windoze and Macs for admin purposes etc at University - I still have my version running under wine on my linux boxes as the licences were retired once main computer support got involved and rewrote in terms of relational databases - still very useful tho due to its ease of creating new databases+formated reports etc + free text search tho an administration nightmare if you make extensive use of the scripting (possibly all this has been corrected in later versions) - it had the ability to output in csv (eg for import into MS excel spreadsheets) or tab separated items which is my usual way of passing data to various Perl filters etc

[Stunsworth]

If the program can export a delimited file you'll probably be better exporting it as tab delimited or pipe ( | ) delimited rather than comma delimited. Embedded commas (eg composer "Strauss, Richard") can cause havoc when importing into another spreadsheet such as Excel.

[Ferretfancy]

Thanks to everybody for all the helpful replies, as a bear of little brain it will take a while to check out all the suggestions, but I'm sure I'll find a solution.

[Risorgimento]

Ferretfancy, this link might help you. Exporting Appleworks database to Excel. A quick Google has shown a fair number of solutions.

http://www.nclack.k12.or.us/cms/lib6/or01000992/centricity/domain/264/convertawtoxls.pdf