FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual

Advanced Find Mode

In Chapter 1 you learned about using Find mode for simple searches—but you only scratched the surface. The more records you have in your database, the more you’ll need advanced finding techniques to avoid wasting precious minutes clicking the Book icon 1,057 times in a row just to find the record or records you want to display, edit, or print. FileMaker’s Find tools give you the power to track down the one record in 100,000 you need right this minute, or the five records with missing phone numbers that you created a week ago Tuesday.

Finding by Omitting

If you know what you don’t want better than what you do want, you can use the Omit checkbox. This feature comes in handy when the records you’re looking for can best be described by what they aren’t. For example, “every person who isn’t from California” is a lot easier to say than “everyone from Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado…” In this case, you can get what you want by creating one find request, with California in the State field. Then, before you perform the find, simply turn on the Omit checkbox, which appears in the status area only when you’re in Find mode (Figure 2-5). That’s all there is to it. FileMaker starts with every record in the table, then throws out all the records with “California” in the State field, so you’re left with everything else.

Omit also works with multiple find requests (see the box on The wildcard (*)). If all your requests have the Omit option turned on, then all the records ...