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Now we get to move over the fields we want and remember, this is a Show Multiple
Records, it's more like a spreadsheet view and so we don't want a lot of fields
in here, we don't certainly want as many as we have here, we want a limited
amount of them. So we'll move over the first name, the last name, and let's say
the city and the state. And you can, of course, rearrange these if you want,
we'll hit Next. Now it asks us if we want to sort. Well, I like to do this
manually anyhow because I might want to sort differently every time and
actually when you sort this way it only does it once anyhow. So you'd have to
manually sort yourself anyhow, so let's completely skip this. And then you have
a choice of a theme, what do you want it to look like? And there's quite a few
choices here. Some of them are better than others, and it really gives you a
head start on putting a look and feel on there. I really like the aqua screen
if you're going to choose one, but it's up to you, there's quite a few to choose
from. Now what we're actually going to do though is the standard. We want it to
match what we have because we're going to put our own interface eventually on
this, so we want to have a blank slate, essentially. So we'll just choose the
boring old standard and then hit Next. And now it asks you, do you want to put
information in the header or footer? And you'll probably already guess that
headers go at the top of the page, footers go at the bottom of the page, and
essentially the body's everything between, essentially the record. Well, if we
want to put something in the header, which you will see in a List View, then we
can choose these. Now we can do all the stuff that you're going to see here
through all the menus and from over here but this gives you easy access to the
most common things. So you could put a page number in there, a current date.
We're going to skip all this because we're going to do it manually later, but
let's try one of them to see how it works. And we'll just type in List View as
a text we want in the header. So we'll click OK. And we could do all these
choices if we wanted to, but we'll hit Next now. And do we want to create a script?
No, we're not going to work with scripts right now, so let's skip that part. And
then do we want to view this in Preview mode or Layout mode? Well, this is only
where it starts out and I actually want you to see what it looks like in Layout
mode first. You can obviously switch to Preview mode later. This doesn't prevent
you, these choices, from going to Preview mode, it's just how you initially view
it, so I'm going to initially view it in Layout mode, and now we're ready to
finish. And so here's the big difference between the two layouts, look at the
body part. See the size difference here? OK, this is a really small body, and
there's another difference too, not shown in Layout mode that we're going to
see, but you can see where List View's up there. So let's take a look at it in
Browse mode. Now you can see that we can see all of our records one after another.
We can scroll through them using the scroll bar and walk through them as well. You
can see that that little black line moves every time to show the record that we
have selected. This is important for List View because we're showing multiple
records. And this determines what record you're acting upon. So if I hit the Tab
key, I'm going to go into Bob's record right now. And if I switch to a different
layout, remember we're in Bob's record, it'll still be on that same record. OK,
so this is important to realize, so if I switch over here to Nancy Osborne, go
to List View, you'll see we're on Nancy Osborne right now. So the List View's a
great little tool for being able to look at a whole bunch of records at once.
Now the big difference between a Form View and a List View, other than what we've
showed you in Layout mode, is this. View as List, see how it's checked here?
And if we switch to Contacts, which is our original layout, it has View as Form, so
we'll go back here and take a look at it, well what if we switch this to View as
Form? Well, we see one record at a time. One very small record, still editable,
still walk through the records, we just only see one at a time. So obviously we
want it on List View here. In fact, we could go back to this layout and view it
as List. It doesn't really make much sense here because the records are so large.
So typically when you design a layout, you design it for one type, View as Form or
View as List. Now there is another choice here. This is your View as Table. I
typically don't use these types of layouts, but it's up to you, everybody's got
a different type of way of designing. But the reason I like these layouts is
because you can't really control the interface that much. So we'll take a look
at it real quickly though. View as Table looks like a spreadsheet. We can
rearrange the way that these look, we can sort by the different columns, we can
even resize the columns. So it's a lot like a spreadsheet here, it can be a
very nice ad hoc layout or developer layout, but typically I don't give users
access to this because I really can't do much as far as controlling the way that
this layout looks. You really can't, you know, as we get into interface design,
you really don't have much choice, all this looks the same. But there are a few
things you can change, so let's go into Layout mode real quick. And then we're
going to go into Layout Setup under the Layouts menu. And then we're going to
skip this part but realize that it's the same information as when you created
the new layout, remember, Show Records from Contacts? Including layout, there's
the name. This is how you would get back to change the name of your layout if
you wanted to. There's some other stuff in here that we're not going to cover
so we're going to skip over it real quickly. But we'll go to Views and we'll
take a look at this. In the Views section of Layout Setup, you can determine
whether these types of views show up under the View menu. OK, remember, Form
View, List View, Table View? If it's unchecked, it's dimmed and not available. I
typically don't worry about this because I usually take care of all the menus,
but if you didn't want somebody to switch your List View to a Form View or Table
View, just uncheck it. And in addition, the Table View has some properties. You
have Grid style, colors and all this stuff, play around with this if you really
like the Table View. We have Include in header part, Include in footer part, OK,
this says put that header and footer on there. If you remember when we switched
from List View to Table View that header went away and that List View wasn't there.
Well we can include it if we want, and include the footer. Now the other options
are defaulted here. Resizable columns, all the stuff that we did manually when
you saw me sort and all that kind of stuff. But you can turn those off if you
don't want people working with it that way. It's up to you, it's here, you can
make the changes if you want. So we'll click OK, click OK again, and then we'll
go back to Browse mode. And now since we've made changes to this layout, it's
going to ask us, do you want to save the changes? Now, you can check this box,
but you want to think about it. That will certainly make it so that going from
Layout mode to Browse mode the save is automatic, but then you'll lose this
option for Don't Save, meaning that if you made a change in the Layout mode and
you go "Oh I really messed this thing up," you can hit Don't Save and it would
all be gone, it's like a Revert Record but for Layout mode. Obviously we want to
save here, so we'll save it. And now you can see your header part up here. So
you do get a little bit of interface control but I really do like the View as
List better because I really have much more control over the way it looks. So
that's what I'm going to stick with, now we have a List View and a Contacts View
and now you have the basics on how to work with layouts, create new layouts,
essentially create new views in your database.