FileMaker Pro 9

New Layout pt. 2 Video Training - Tutorial

New Layout pt. 2 1

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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.

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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