FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual

Editing What’s in Your Fields

Once you’ve found the records you want to work on, it’s time to learn timesaving and creative ways to revise and format your record text. FileMaker fields are a lot more capable than the little fields you’re used to from dialog boxes. Each field is like a mini–word processor, with features that you’re familiar with if you’ve ever written a letter on a computer. Of course, you can do basic things like select text, and cut, copy, and paste. There’s even a Find and Replace feature and flexible text formatting powers. Read on to find out what you can do.

Find and Replace

Like your word processor, FileMaker has a Find and Replace feature. Also as in your word processor, you can (and should) use Find and Replace tools as often as possible to automate your editing process and eliminate retyping.

Suppose one of your clients is called Anderson Consulting. For one reason or another, they decide to change their name to Accenture. Unfortunately, you have 27 folks in your database with the old name, and the name is sprinkled in Company Name fields, Notes fields, and so on. You could look through your records one by one and fix them yourself, but you’re never going to become a database guru that way. Instead, do a Find/Replace operation.

FileMaker fields can hold a lot of information, and it’s not at all uncommon to put things like letters, emails, product descriptions, and other potentially long documents into a field. In cases like this, the Find/Replace command is ...