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We're going to switch to Layout mode and briefly cover how to create a new layout.
And we'll cover layouts in more detail later, but we want to give you a basic idea
on how to work with layouts and how to create different views of your information.
Think of a layout as like a window in a house. Your database is your house and
through each window you can see a different room. So you might see the living
room from one window, the kitchen from another window, and actually you might
even see from the living room, you might see part of the kitchen. So think of
layouts as views into your information. And you might have some of the same
fields, and some of the same graphics, and you might have none of the same
fields, and none of the same graphics, it's all up to you. But it really, a
layout is not your database, it's not the actual fields from Define Database,
they're kind of like aliases or shortcuts. They're just allowing you to look at
that information. So what we want is, right now, if you look at it, we only have
one layout, just Contacts. So if we go to Layout mode, if we want to have
another layout so that we have the Rolodex available here so we can have a
different way of looking at our information, we have to create a new layout. Now
before we do that, take a quick mental picture of what we have here. Look at the
header, the body, and the footer, and I realize we haven't explained those yet,
but look at how big they are. And when we're done with our new layout, I want
you to compare the difference. So what we have here is a foreign view for
looking at one record at a time. That's what the Layout mode translates into
Browse mode. Now what we're going to create is a list for you so we can view
many records at a time on one screen. And so to do that, we'll go up to the
Layouts menu and choose New Layout/Report. It'll come up with this dialog and
you'll want to read it from left to right, top to bottom. And so the first
choice is Show Records from what? What table do you want to show records from?
Well this is a single table file right now, it'll eventually have multiple tables,
but right now we can only choose one table. So that's Contacts and but
eventually what we're going to do is have all kinds of tables and so it will
make a difference what table we choose. And so this is what records will
actually display, what fields you'll have access to. Now when you throw in
relationships, and portals, and related fields, which we'll get into later, of
course you can show information from other tables on this layout. But this is
the base table, what each record, so if you have 100 records and contacts,
we're going to see 100 records here. If we had, let's say, products in here,
and you had 200 records, if we chose that then you'd see 200 records on that
layout, specifically from products, or contacts, or whatever table you chose.
The next thing to do is to name the layout, so we'll call it List View because
this will be a list view. And then you have this little check box. Now if you
uncheck this, that means that this layout, List View, will not be available
from the pop up menu. And that's not entirely true, it'll actually be available
from Layout mode. You always have to have access to that layout. So in Layout
mode, you'll be able to see List View, even with this unchecked, but in Browse
mode, Find mode, and Preview mode, you won't be able to see List View. And this
is kind of a way to hide these layouts that you don't want users to access
manually. In fact, what we'll actually eventually do is get rid of the whole
status area so they can't move to them but I like to take all these off so that
users have to stick with the scripts and buttons. Think of the invoicing
solution we showed you at the beginning, the goal for this whole thing. It's
all run by buttons and things, you never even see the status area. But for
right now, just to make it easy for us, I'm going to check that so that you can
easily get from one layout to another. Now here's your types of layouts, you
have your Standard form, which is what this type of layout is here, the one we
have as a default. And then you also have your Column, List, and Report, and you
can see how it changes over here. This allows you to show more than one record
on the screen or on the page because this is for Browse mode as well as Preview
mode and Print. You can use it in all those different modes. And then you have a
Table View, which is your spreadsheet view, Labels, Vertical Labels, Envelopes,
and my favorite, the Blank Layout. And you can see the page is completely blank.
Well why? Because I want to design my own layouts myself and I can use all these
tools over here and graphics from Photoshop and things like that to build all
this myself. What these do, these different choices here is walk you through the
process. So you can see when I choose this, it's next, when I choose this it
says Finish. Well eventually you're going to want to go ahead and learn how to
build all this stuff yourself and you can. Nothing we're going to do can't be
done with the other tools in there. And this kind of locks you into a certain
way of doing things so I want to have all the freedom I can. Not that I can't
change this layout once I've built it, you can. But I want to start from scratch
usually here. So this is 99% of the time I choose this. But we're going to go
with this for starters, make a columnar report and click Next. And there are
basically two choices, two Radio buttons, this is for reporting with sub
summaries which we're going to talk about later, we're going to work with the
columnar list report which is really for Browse mode. And you can see that it
has a choice here and watch what happens over here when I check it. You see how
this constrains it to an 8 1/2 by 11 page or whatever you had set up in Print
Setup? OK, well we don't want that because this is for viewing on-screen and
obviously we have more than an 8 1/2 width here, so we can see much more. So we
want all of the fields to go beyond that page break, so we'll hit Next.