Vectorworks Plant Database on Your iPad

The Vectorworks plant database is made with with a program called Filemaker. Filemaker is a database program, so it is ideal for making the Vectorworks plant database. On your computer, you can search for plants, tag plants for a project, add your own plant images and add your own comments on each plant. This is great when you are in your office, but what are you supposed to when you leave the office to go on site? If you have a laptop, you could carry it with you, it’s just that it is not that easy to hold a laptop in one hand a type on it with the other.

An iPad, now if only you could carry the plant database on your iPad….

Filemaker has released a version of their software that works on an iPad called Filemaker Go. You can read more about this here. This software allows you copy your plant database onto your iPad. When you buy Filemaker, you use iTunes to add it to your iPad. After that, you can tell iTunes to copy files to your iPad to carry with you. When you do this, you take a copy of the file, and any changes you make on the iPad are not automatically copied back to your computer. So, you can’t really carry your original plant database but you can carry a copy. This means that any changes you make to the plant database are NOT copied to your original, but you can copy the copy the plant database from your iPad back to your computer (overwriting the original).

On the iPad, you start Filemaker Go. Then you choose the database that you want to open. You might notice that I have copied the USR portion of the plant database. This is the part that has all the plants in it.

When you open the plant database, you have all the records, you can edit them search and so on. Now you can take your plant database with you in the field.