FileMaker won itself a reputation early in its life as the epitome of easy-to-use, flat-file databases. Although it now has some relational capabilities as well, it's retained its simplicity of operation while adding in useful extra features. Version 7 saw a revamp of its file format to allow more sophistication of data structures and version 8 was a consolidation of that, with the addition of things like mail merging through e-mail and data export to PDF and Excel files.

Version 8.5 is only a half-version update and probably has only just enough to warrant the 0.5. The key feature of FileMaker Pro 8.5 is its ability to build a Web page viewer into a data record. This may not seem very useful, but think about it.

If you use FileMaker to keep a list of your customers, wouldn't it be helpful to be able to call up a street map to their address, using something like Google Maps? Or if you keep a share portfolio, wouldn't it be handy to pop up the current share price and movement from a financial site whenever you look at one of your stocks?

Behind FileMaker lies the concept of scripts telling the database how to behave, and a couple of lines of new commands can pop up a Web page within each record. You can derive the address of the displayed page from a field on the record, though extracting information from the Web page back into FileMaker is not so easy. Further development for FileMaker 9, perhaps.

In other ways, FileMaker 8.5 adds little to what was already available. There's the FileMaker Learning Center, which provides video tutorials on using and programming FileMaker, and some extra pre-written scripts, but in essence you're buying FileMaker Pro 8.0 with Web page viewing.

Which isn't to say you shouldn't buy it. If you have FileMaker 7.0 or earlier, there are many improvements to interest you, like the ability to design layouts with tabs so that you can separate out information and make it easier to follow.

Then there are local and global variables, so you can hold intermediary values within a database without having to define fields to hold them. You now have to name all objects in a layout, but you can also go directly to an object and extract details from it, such as size, orientation and content. This gives you a lot more flexibility.

The incorporation of Web pages into FileMaker records is much more useful than you might at first think; it's not a gimmick. There are plenty of other good reasons for using FileMaker - the easiest database workhorse to use for home office or small business - it's just that not many of those reasons are new in the 8.5 update.