FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual

Navigating Your Database

As exciting as it is to enter data into a database—well, the first time anyway—chances are you’ll want to look at those records again at some point. In fact, some may say that’s the whole point of building a database. But first, you need to learn how to navigate the records in the database, which this section explains. Fortunately, moving around a database isn’t nearly as tough as following maps and highway signs in a foreign country. FileMaker makes it easy to skip from one record to the next, all the while keeping you abreast of where you are.

Tip

As you go through this section on navigating, it helps to have a database open in front of you so you can follow along and try some of these techniques. Since you probably don’t have many records in the Contact Management database you just created, there’s a sample one for you to download on the “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds.

Navigating Record by Record

In the Contact Management database, you can add as many records as you want. But you can view only one at a time in the window FileMaker displays. To tell FileMaker which record you want to look at, you have three options:

• The book icon lets you flip from record to record one at a time. Pretend your database is a book, with each record on its own page. To get to the next record, click the right-hand page. To go back, click the left-hand page. If you can’t go any further in one direction, the appearance of the icon’s “page” changes, as shown in Figure 1-14 ...