FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual

Tab Controls

When a window needs to show you more information than fits comfortably on one screen, software designers resort to dividing it up onto an array of tabs. Just about every dialog box these days has a few tabs scattered across the top. For example, the Layout Setup dialog box in Figure 5-24 has tabs for General, Views, and Printing. Most Web browsers offer tabbed browsing so you can switch among different Web pages open in the same window.

FileMaker windows can get overcrowded, too. The Google Maps Web viewer you just added, for example, makes your overall layout quite large, and honestly, the map page would be happier with even more space. There are times when you just can’t stretch a layout any farther. Maybe some of your employees have smaller monitors and you don’t want them to have to scroll to see everything on the layout. Or you may feel you’ve already created a beautiful layout, with perfect proportions, and stretching it to fit a big map viewer would ruin the design you worked so hard to create. Whatever the reason, if you don’t want to make a layout bigger, you can organize lots more fields by adding a tab panel (Figure 6-42). Then you can simply click the tab to see the map (which is still much less work than visiting a separate Web browser).

Creating a Tab Control

If you want to add another set of fields to hold the work addresses of the contacts in your People database, you have to make the layout bigger in order to hold your new fields. The hardest part of adding ...