What we want to do now is talk about layouts. Right now we only have one layout as
you can see. Now matter what we only have one layout we can choose, I want to
make a second layout and show you the power of what layouts can do. So layouts
essentially are windows in your house. If you're standing outside of your house
and you look through a window you might see a living room, and maybe you can see
the dining room through there and if you're at another window maybe you can see
part of the living room, part of the family room and who knows what you can see
from every window at every angle. That's kind of what a layout is. It allows you
to have different views of your information. It's not the structure of your
house it's a view into your data so you might have one layout that shows you in
this case, if we go back to Browse Mode, this is really a form view, you're
looking at one record at a time. What we want to do is show you another view of
your information which show multiple records at a time. And you might have a
print layout that's specifically for printing, one is specifically for finding.
All these are different ways of looking at your information and they have nothing
to do with the structure, it's just ways of looking at your data. So let's go
into Layout Mode and we could go to the View Menu and do that but we also have
this Edit Layout option here. So there we go, we're into Layout Mode and notice
that it also says Exit Layout here also. But again you can exit the layout but
just going to a different mode. It's up to you. So now that we're in Layout Mode
we can create a new layout. We only have one, as we showed, we only have one here.
We only have, you know this is all dimmed out so we can't move around. So we're
going to go up to the Layouts menu and choose New Layout/Report. And this
Dialog you'll become very familiar with it because you could very well have ten
or twenty or even a hundred layouts in your solution because you want to view
your information in different ways. Lots of layouts can mean lots of
sophisticated interface. So the first thing you want to do is figure that you
read a Dialog left to right, top to bottom. So the first thing you want to do is
look at this. Show Records From. What does this mean? This is refereeing to your
Table. We only have on Table so there's only one choice. And actually it's
really refereeing to a Table Occurrence but we're not going to get into that yet.
All Table Occurrences Refer back to a Source Table and so for right now you can
think of this as a table. And so we want to choose the right table when you're
creating a layout because that determines what records are going to show. If you
had companies and employees, you want to make sure you're showing company
records not employee records if it's a company layout that you want to view
company information on. It makes a big difference and it goes back to that word
context we talked about. Now the next thing you want to do is give this a good
name. We're going to call this list view because this is going to be a layout
that we use to view more than one record at a time and that's called a list view.
Now you also have this little checkbox here. Now it's important that you understand
what this checkbox does. It allows you to see that menu that we're making, the
list view, from this layout menu no matter what mode you're in, we've showed it
in several modes now. If you uncheck it, that means you can only see that menu
while you're in Layout Mode, or that menu while you're in Layout Mode. Or that
layout under the menu, in Layout Mode means it's a developer only access. So you
won't see it in Browse Mode or Find Mode or Preview Mode, it will be like it's
not there. But for right now we're going to keep it checked. And the next thing
you want to do is take a look at these layout types. There are quite a few here.
My favorite is the blank type. I use this almost exclusively. And you notice that
the example here is blank. Now for right now we're going to show you how to use
one of these assistants or wizards that walk you through the layout process. I
like to create mine from scratch and use Photoshop and all my skills to create a
unique looking layout rather than one of the ones that are just standard inside
the FileMaker solution. Now these are just fine if you're starting out but as
you get more experience you're going to use blank layout. So you have Standard
Form which is essentially what this is right here, a Standard Form. It has a
header, a body and a footer and you notice how big the body is. That's because
the body part is really the record. The header goes at the top, footer goes at
the bottom. And that's more important, the header and footer in printing but it
does play a part in, especially in list view. So, List/Report is your list
or report. You can do a sub summary report from here or you can just do a simple
Browse Mode List View Layout. Then you have you're Table View which is a lot
like a spreadsheet. You can create labels from here or vertical labels. You can
do envelopes and then of course the blank layout and of course you can make all
these layouts yourself if you want. If you know enough about FileMaker these are
just assistants that walk you through the process. So realize that when we're
doing this, that it's just helping you out if you're a beginner in FileMaker.
When you become more sophisticated, you'll probably build most your layouts from
the blank.
FileMaker 10 Beginner
John Mark Osborne
US$ 99.95
15 hours - 172 Movies
Win Vista XP 2000,ME. Mac OS X
Ground / 2 day / Next Day
33925
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