FileMaker Pro 9

New Layout pt. 1 Video Training - Tutorial

New Layout pt. 1 1

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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.

FileMaker Pro 9

John Mark Osborne

US$ 99.95

12.5 hours - 145 Movies

Win Vista XP 2000,ME. Mac OS X

Ground / 2 day / Next Day

33783

176 In Stock


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