I am a newbie to Filemaker and inherited a problem that I'm having
difficulty with. The person prior to me used FM to produce reports on
teacher evaluation for a number of classes containing a number of
students. The database was constructed using a set of questions that
are always fixed for each course. I noticed that each question has
an "option" of "auto-entered previous" when I take a look at the
database structure using the "define fields" submenu. I am assuming
that this will automatically propogate these value in these fields to
each record which is great. Other fields in the database are being
generated as statistical summaries for each question and are imported
from SAS. I have generated a clone of the desired database. Is there
a way that I can import the fixed questions from an Excel spreadsheet
by name? Or, is there a way that I can import the fixed questions
from an existing FM database? If so, will raw data representing
the summaries be imported into the FM database by creation order
without destroying the data for the fixed fields imported from Excel
(or an existing database)?

This is all being run from a desktop using Windows XP. It has both
FM5 and FM8 installed. I bought a couple of books and scanned
articles before resorting to this post. Unfortunately, most of my
database experience has been with the sql variety.