FileMaker Pro 12: The Missing Manual

Appendix B. File Conversion

Along with all its new features, FileMaker Pro 12 has changed the file format for its databases from .fp7 to .fmp12. If you have a database that was created using any previous version of FileMaker Pro, you’ll need to convert the file before you can open it with any edition of FileMaker 12. FileMaker 12 does the converting: Both FileMaker Pro 12 and FileMaker Pro Advanced 12 can convert files created with versions 7 through 11.

Note

If you have databases created with FileMaker Pro 1 or 2, you’ll need to dig out a copy of FileMaker Pro 6 and convert them to that format first, then convert them to .fp7 using FileMaker Pro 11. Once that’s done, you can convert your databases to fmp12 format.

Compatibility

Before FileMaker Pro 12, it was perfectly fine to have some users running FileMaker Pro 10 while others used FileMaker Pro 11 to connect to the FileMaker Server 11. So long as the file formats matched, you could get away without upgrading everyone’s software at once. But because of the file format change, you need to upgrade your database and everyone’s FileMaker Pro software at the same time. And if your FileMaker solution contains more than one database (some organizations have dozens of files working together), you must convert them all, since FileMaker Server 12 can share only files that have the .fmp12 format.

After they’re converted, the .fmp12 files are compatible only with FileMaker Pro 12 products. However, when you convert a file, the original remains ...