Okay, I know this has been brought up many times but I want to see which way people have gone from using Appleworks' database module. I have several AW databases (none that are large) that I use regularly to do mail merges with. I have a lot of template letters, as well. These are used in my business as a professional magician and part-time photographer. I do letters of agreement, simple contracts, invoices, envelopes, etc.

Appleworks has become a lot less stable in Snow Leopard. (It crashes if I try to merge into a new document rather than printing or saving to a new document.) Anyway, it's about time I move on.

Here's what I'm looking at. I wanted to keep it inexpensive so today I downloaded OpenOffice 3.2.1 to see if I can work with Base. I've played with it a little and it seems like it will have a reasonable learning curve. I haven't yet tried to do a mail merge so I'm not sure how well that will work.

I've also reviewed Daylite to see if it is a better alternative. It looks nice and appears to be more intuitive but it is more costly. I haven't downloaded the trial version yet to see how complex it will be to recreate my templates in it.

So, here are my questions. If you used Appleworks database module like I am, what did you go to and why? Also, which application will run the smoothest with the shortest learning curve. (I'm not really up to learning a complex program. Base looks like it could be complex to customize to my needs.)

Thanks in advance for your comments.

Filemaker Pro, version 8, 9, or even 10. Look on eBay, I'm sure there are plenty of copies there.

Bento might be able to do it too.

[www.filemaker.com]

[www.filemaker.com]

Jeff

Just curious, but what are you doing with your database? Are you making it available online? Or only on 1 computer?

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All I ever really needed to know, I learned from watching Star Trek.

I am only using my database on one computer.

Unfortunately, Bento is not an option as it doesn't do mail merge. (They have a work around but it's not a true mail merge.)

If you really wanted to rough it, you could even use Microsoft Office.

Excel to manage your list of data, and Word to make your letters, etc. There's a mail merge function somewhere between the two, think you kick it off from Word, pointing to the data in the Excel file.

Jeff