FileMaker Pro 11: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Organizing and Editing Records

In the first chapter, you learned how to use FileMaker’s basic tools and get around your database. But you’ve just begun to scratch the surface of FileMaker’s power. Now it’s time to learn how to see, sort, move, and shape your information in myriad ways. For example, you may want to print a list of names and addresses for all the folks in your database who live in the western U.S. In an invoicing database, you may want to find everybody who’s ordered 16-pound offset widgets in the last month so you can email them a special offer for widget accessories. In a student database, you may need to print a report of all third-grade students who were involved in lunchroom disciplinary actions during the first semester.

Whatever your needs, you can build on basic techniques to view your data in ever more sophisticated ways. After all, slicing, dicing, and analyzing your data is the whole point of storing the information in a database.

Views

The most common way to view and edit records is called Form view. In Form view, you work with just one record at a time. In List view, you see the same arrangement of your records in, well, a list. If they don’t all fit in the window, then you can use the vertical scroll bar to scroll through them. If you’ve used a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, then Table view looks familiar—it looks a lot like a spreadsheet, with one row for each record, and one column for each field.

To switch among views in any FileMaker ...