Hide Caption
Show Caption
In a previous tutorial we covered Preview mode very briefly, went over it really
quickly and I want to cover it more extensively so you really understand what
Preview mode is all about. But before we do that I want to work in Browse mode
a little bit longer and cover this last item, Revert Record. Now it's dimmed
right now because we have nothing to revert. You have to make a change. And when
you make that change, you'll see that Revert Record becomes available. If we
don't choose it and actually exit the record, that can be done by clicking
outside of the fields or switching to a different record, you'll notice that
Revert Record goes away. So as soon as you exit the fields or change records,
you can't revert anymore. So what we want to do is remove that, get it back to
where it was, and make some changes. We'll type in, let's say Robert here
instead, and maybe go ahead and remove this value, and work on any field we
want, type in a value here. And if we choose Revert Record, it reverts it back
to where it was when we started editing it. Now only the edits that were done
between exiting the records, in other words, if we clicked outside the fields,
started editing, it will only go from that point at which we clicked into the
field and started editing. So watch what happens. Bob goes back to - Robert
goes back to Bob, Willford gets back in there, and there's no value in the Email
field anymore. So Revert Record is very powerful. It also can be something you
need to make sure you really understand how it works, or otherwise it really
can't help you because if you don't realize that once you exit out of the fields
that Revert's gone, well it can't help you. But it also can be detrimental, you
might accidentally go ahead and revert something you didn't want to, so make
sure you're really sure that that's what you want to use and that it's going to
do exactly what you want. And that involves you understanding how records become
revertable. And it has to do with again, if you type into a field, you can
revert that, but as soon as you exit out of it, you can't revert anymore. So
let's into Preview mode now, and now again, what you're looking at is what will
print out. You can actually match this up against a print-out if you went to the
File menu and chose Print. This is exactly what would print out. I mean,
there's a little bit of difference, it's a screen versus paper, but essentially
you can count on this looking just like what you're going to print out. And what
FileMaker tries to do is fit as many records per page as possible. Now, we can
change that with features like Sliding Objects and things like that, which we're
going to go over later. But you can see right now as we scroll down, we only can
fit two records in here - Danielle Bradbury, and the first one, Billy Adlington.
A space is left at the end because there are options to say whether you want to
split a record across pages or not. And at this point, they're choosing not to
split the records. So we can go to the next page and view the next record. And
you can walk through as many of these pages as you want, but the question mark
is going to remain there until you go to the end, and this is speed reasons.
Filemaker calculates each page as it needs it, and so until you go to the very
last page, it really doesn't know how many total pages there are because it's
still putting the records on there. So if you want to see how many pages there
are you go to the last record and then you can start thumbing through them like
this, and it'll keep that total number of pages there for you. OK, so just as in
Browse mode, you have these icons down here to zoom in and out, OK? You can show
and hide the status area. And you also have your Records menu. Now a lot of
things are dimmed right now. You can't create a new record, you can't duplicate
a record, you can't delete a record, you really can't do anything with records
because which record are you acting upon? There's many records per pages here.
You're actually walking through pages when you use a Rolodex here. However, you
can use Go To Record. Now what it's actually going to do is not really go to
record next, it's going to do the same thing as a Rolodex, which is go to the
next page. So realize that even though it says Go To Record, this is really
referring to a page and of course, specify refers to the page down here as well.
You have Refresh Window if you want to refresh it. And if we do it, you'll see that
really what happens is it goes back to the first page in this case, and you've
got a question mark again. So it completely refreshes after you came back into
Preview mode. Kind of interesting how that works. Now again, Show All Records,
Show Omitted Only, Sort Records, all these things will only be worked on in
later chapters, later tutorials. We're not going to work on them right now
because they work with found sets but essentially everything else is dimmed out,
you can't do a Replace here because we can't put our cursor into a field, we
can't Revert Record, none of these things work because we're in Preview mode,
and though the menu says Records, it really is Preview mode so it just dims out
these options here. Now, some other things that are very important to look at is
how Print Setup or Page Setup interacts with Preview mode. It's just like as if
you're printing it, so if we go up here to Page Setup or, if you're on Windows,
it'll probably say Print Setup and choose it, we'll get this dialog. It looks
similar on Windows in regards to what orientation you have. So if we change it
to landscape and click OK, well, we're going to get our page in landscape mode
in Preview mode. So remember that Print Setup and Page Setup interact with
Preview mode just like it does with your printer. So you can actually see what
it, if everything's going to fit on a landscape if you want. So we'll go back in
here, move this over, switch back to landscape, but we could change the scale if
we wanted to, the paper size, and even changing the printer will change how
Preview mode, as well as how printing works, OK? So realize that everything in
here will effect Preview, just like it effects the print out. So in the case of
the paper size and the printer and all those things, well that'll change what
you see here as far as size. Like if you chose Postcard, it would be this big
then, but if you chose a different printer, well you might get smaller margins
here because right now, the way that it's set up is to use the smallest possible
margins. So the choice that I have from Print Setup says that I basically get a
quarter inch margins around. That's the largest printable area that you have
right now. You can, in Layout mode, set it to be a specified, like let's say a
half an inch on each side, so it disregards what the Print Setup is. But right
now realize that these margins right here are set up by the type of printer I
have selected right now. So that's about it for Preview mode, just realize it's
really basically just showing what you would print out.