Sounds great — I just can't imagine learning a whole new suite of apps!

Coincidentally, I downloaded the free trial of Bento yesterday. So far, I love it! I'm hoping it helps me get a little more organized at work and outside of work.

Bento is good DayLite 3 is great. Try the free download at Marketcircle.com. Greatest CRM for Mac I have found. Great for single user or growing office.

Wes

I'm with you on that Market Circle's Daylite three is amazing!

Bento would be much better if you could print out the data in your database tables. To not have this function is incredible.

If you want to spend four times as much, Daylite sounds great. The difference in price puts them in completely different product categories, IMO.

If you want to print your data in a Bento database, export it as a CSV and import it into any spreadsheet for a simple printout, or use it as the data source for a mail-merge in any word processor so you can format it to your heart's content.

It costs $50. What do you expect? If you want it beefed up so you can buy it for $100, please leave me the $50 version.

I love Bento. I've used it since its first beta. I pull together stuff from iCal, my address book and lists I've made up on my own.

I use it to organize stuff, keep track of stuff, remember what I've done with whom or to what and generally find information I need when I need it. I don't use it for reports or other paper-consuming activites. I filter or search or sort to find things on the computer and go from there.

Hmmm. I just checked. You actually CAN print. Just sort or filter or whatever so that the table view is showing the entries you want and choose File:Print and select "All displayed records" from the available options.

You can even save paper by creating a .PDF file instead of printing it... or just use it on the screen, like it's designed to be used and give up on killing trees for a report you'll use for less than a week before you print a new one.

Will it export into numbers? or only excel?

Can I sync Bento between my 2 Macs? I have not been able to find an answer to that.

Syncing question is relative to us with us using a multiplicity of computers. Additionally, how does Bento organize .pdf's .doc's .ai, .jpg's? I still don't have this in my mind yet.

I love, love, love my Bento! Very beautiful, easy to use and inexpensive. Meshes perfectly with my address book. Love it! Oh I said that already.

I don't have Bento (I'm a FileMaker consultant, still on Tiger) but if Bento can export a .csv ("comma separated values") file, then Numbers can open that as well as Excel.

I purchased Bento, fooled around with it for a little while, and gave up. It's the exact same reaction I had with FileMaker.

Maybe I'm just a dunce, but I don't find either package intuitive, or useful, out of the box.

I need some tutorials, or instruction videos, or something.

Frankly, Entourage does a decent enough job of managing more than 2,300 work and personal contacts. I thought database software would be better and easier, but it's neither.

Bento is not for everyone. It integrates with iCal and Addressbook, exports to Excel/Numbers as .csv and is a single-user application only. I use it for my small business. I have created linked fields to related files (quotations) for each record, meaning when I am at a particular customer's card I can quickly open the last offer I have sent that customer. I also have created a visit record for each customer, which is linked to another collection of all visits. This way I can see all my visits/contacts for a particular customer or I can pull out all my visits in a given week, say. Wonderful and easy to set up once you play around just a little.

Printing and formatting could be more flexible, but this may just be an old habit refusing to go green.... get a laptop and you don't really need to print as you have all your information at all times!

I have been using basic features of Filemaker for ten years and welcomed Bento as it would integrate more efficiently with Address Book. Must say am very disappointed by Apple's showing on this. To start, the templates are butt ugly, they mostly look like bad wallpaper or carpet. The colors are very drab and dull. Not at all what you would expect from Apple. Plus, the fields are too rigid. If you create your own template, you soon realize that you can't have multiple email addresses without creating multiple fields - this is ridiculous if you have 10+ contacts at one company, there is no room left for any other data on the page. Plus there is no way to delete the name of the field (ie. where it says "Email" next to the email field") so you have lots of extra space used up on each page. Very basic and very disappointing. This product is only useful for colorblind people who are database novices and happy to use the templates provided. Current Filemaker customers are better off waiting for improvements before buying.

I do not see the reason to use Bento (and all bento-like apps). This kind of app is rather good (and topmost needed) on ugly and hard to use windows platforms from Microsoft corporation.
On Mac - simply - you have included in your OS tools like: smart folders, spotlight etc. So why have you to use 3rd party apps (in fact - they uses the mechanisms of OS X - smart folders etc.)...

Bento needs work to be functional.

Needs mailing label printing.
Needs easier export to Filemaker.
Needs to import v-cards and export v-cards.

I like it because it integrates with address book and I-Cal.
I am old hand at Filemaker and started with PFS more than 20 years ago. Data bases don't bother me, but none of my 11 employees will touch Filemaker, even after expensive training. I will try Bento on them, even though it needs much work to be functional.

I've had Bento since January and do like it. However, Filemaker decided to rely on the OS X address book for dealing with contact info. For those of us who manage databases of non-profits and want the contact info outside of our personal address books, Bento has the gaping missing feature of being able to print to labels. I recently needed to do a large mailing and Appleworks had to come to the rescue to do the labels. And it isn't like this is Filemaker's first database (sarcasm intended). Not supporting label printing is a rookie mistake.

Multiple email addresses are handled with either an email address list field or a related record field from the address book.

Bento is great and it's exciting what you can do and the way it links with Address book and Ical.

But please be careful. We spent about 300 hours importing data, putting everything in the correct fields, setting up calculations that work and making it so useful.

The day before we were ready to swing it into action Address book developed a problem and could not bereliably searched anymore. Applecare helped us fix that by reloading address book.

Great Address book was back ontrack. Only problem was that every single field we created for Bento was empty. What heartbreaker. Lucky I did daily back-ups. Imagine how I felt when all the fields in those back-ups were also empty no matter how far back I went.

Unfortunately I had not set up time machine so I couldn't go back.

Filemaker said "Mmmm interesting problem. Seems unusual. Bad luck."

Any tips on recovery of the information?

I took the risky move of starting my own freelance business right about the time Bento came out and have been wondering if I need it ever since. I fall into the "I don't know what I don't know" category. With a small handful of mostly magazine clients -- billing per project vs. hours - keeping me very busy, I don't know if I need Bento. But I think it's time to download that trial demo. Thanks for this little article.

Missing SYNC via .Mac or directly is the major problem at this moment in Bento for people that travel...

"I do not see the reason to use Bento (and all bento-like apps). This kind of app is rather good (and topmost needed) on ugly and hard to use windows platforms from Microsoft corporation.
On Mac - simply - you have included in your OS tools like: smart folders, spotlight etc. So why have you to use 3rd party apps (in fact - they uses the mechanisms of OS X - smart folders etc.)..."
Posted by: Umbrela, ela, ela

Bento is not a 3rd party app. It's all Apple. For every business person screaming about what it lacks. It's a PERSONAL DATABASE".

It isn't really a database that works as there is no option to mailmerge - the primary use of a database. It looks great. But for managing mailing to supporters/clients it's completely useless.

Exporting stuff through CSV shouldn't be necessary. I have staff who wouldn't be able to do that hundreds of times a week.

Bento is not a real database and until it gets a mail merge facility (for more than names and addresses) it is useless for most database purposes.