Hi Markus,
ODBC isn't an automated process; it just provides an application agnostic method of sharing data between applications. I'm not sure that it would offer any advantage over text or Excel imports, but, in any event, I'm not seeing a way to use ODBC with VW. Am I missing something? No hits in Help, in either Search or the Index. It's surprising to me that such sophisticated software wouldn't offer an ODBC driver, or at least be able to use another driver for import, which is what you'd want to do.
It looks like the only way to automate anything inside the VW environment is to use its scripting language. I've just glanced at it, and, while it appears to be fairly robust, it also looks like there's a lot to learn.
But maybe that's more than you really need. What do you mean by 'automate this step in some way'? A VW script, or an external scripting or programming language, would need an event to trigger the import routine. What would that event be? A change on the Filemaker side? That would get really complicated, requiring a Filemaker script that would call a VW script, which is probably not possible. Maybe VW scripts can be called externally, by VBS/Applescript or some other scripting language. An alternative would be a chron--a VW script run at a regular interval (assuming VW scripts have such a function).
If, however, VW offered an ODBC driver, it might be possible to script the data entry in Filemaker and, as part of that script, push the data into VW via ODBC, assuming that driver made the worksheet accessible. Not hard from the Filemaker side, but I'm not seeing the driver.