Subtitles of the Movie

So let's say it one more time, databases allow you to Find and Sort and then Print, Export or further manipulate your found set of records. So finding and sorting that allows you to rearrange your records, then you can Print them or Export them or you can manipulate them in anyway you want. The key here is making a found set and then sorting. That allows you to rearrange these records and then you can make your printouts and your exports and any other kind of manipulation much more powerful. So many people have used the spreadsheet before and a database and a spreadsheet have a lot of common aspects. In fact a spreadsheet is kind of like a database, it's a mini-database, it's much more limited, it's more flat than a database, a database is relational. But it's a good way to understand what a database is. So if you use a spreadsheet like Excel, you know what rows and columns are. Well those translate to records and fields. One entire row would be one entire record in a database. And each column would be the field. So if you import an Excel spreadsheet into FileMaker, well each row would become a record and each one of those columns would become a field on those records. So really sit back and think about that and try and figure out and understand how a spreadsheet relates to a database especially if you're familiar with a spreadsheet and think about it. Open a spreadsheet; you know type in some stuff, compare it and then when you're going to look at a database it'll help you understand how that would translate over. The big difference though between a spreadsheet and a database is that a database can easily organize records into found sets. We've talked a little bit about this. You can say I want to look at all of the green marbles, you do a Find. You've still got all the other marbles, the purple ones, the blue ones but now you've done a Find to find just this colored marble you want. Or maybe you just want the large marbles, that's the difference, you can make these found sets and manipulate them and work with them. A database also allows you to provide an interface like you see on here, here's an interface. This is a database essentially, I mean this is FileMaker I've made into a slide show but there are buttons to go between the slides, this is an interface. A database also allows you to link tables; this would be a relational structure. You can have companies and employees, this company can have these employees and this other company can have these other employees, you can relate them together. So that on the company record, each company you can see all the employees in what we call a portal. It's all mathematical and this is just something that a spreadsheet doesn't have. You can also have multiple users enter the same file. This is great, in fact if you want to now you can get up to 1,000 users if you want. So all these people can be entering and looking at the same records at the same time and that's really quite powerful. In addition, you could also do web publishing. You can take all the data and publish it to the web. If you go to my website the databasepros.com, you will see that that's all runs on FileMaker. People can search for a file and bring up a list, it's a dynamic website and so you can in fact have people accessing FileMaker on the network with the FileMaker client and using FileMaker as you normally do and also have people accessing all or portions of that database through a web client, through a web browser. So it's very powerful what you can do with a database.