Subtitles of the Movie

Tooltips are a great feature that were added to FileMaker 8 Advanced, and until recently were only available in FileMaker Advanced. But now, in FileMaker 10, you have Tooltips in the regular FileMaker and Advanced versions, so that's great news. Basically Tooltips allow you to see Help information when you float over an object. That object could be a button, it could be text, it could be a tab control, it could be any object that you have in Layout Mode. In fact, we've already created one. You'll see that right there when we float over our Category field, since we didn't have a label we put a Tooltip on there. And these are really the same things you see when you hover over the standard FileMaker interface. They have Tooltips as well, but the Tooltips that you have access to you can control them and display them with whatever information you want, in fact, you can make calculated Tooltips. So, let's go ahead and try these out and see how they work. We'll go into Layout Mode and we'll start by clicking on this text block, and then choosing Format, Set Tooltip. And we're going to type quote Enter information regarding billing, shipping, notes, and media. And then end it with a quote. Let's double check our spelling here. Looks - whoop. There we go. Yup. That looks good. Just forgot the g there. So, it looks like we have a pretty good little message. You probably would spend a lot more time on this message than I did, I'm just proving a point here that you can put any kind of message you want, any length you want. So we'll go ahead and see what that looks like. You hover over that and you'll see your little Help information that appears there. And also, notice that there's this little icon here showing you this object has a Tooltip. Remember that is done through here. If you don't have it showing you have to check this option right here. So, let's try another one. Let's try a button, and buttons are ideal for Tooltips because you can't always fit all of the descriptive text you want inside the button area, so you can have additional information under a Tooltip. I'm not going to make this a fancy message. You'll probably spend more time, but: Search the contacts for the contact you want. Well, that's not so good. Let's put: Search contacts. So, you could obviously spend a lot more time and give them more information about finding things like that, but I'm proving a point here, and we'll come in here, and there we go. There's our little Tooltip. Now, watch out. If you have too many Tooltips they can be a little bit annoying. If everything you hover over has things appearing on the screen, especially if they're really big and cover up an area, you really can't put your mouse anywhere that doesn't have a Tooltip, so choose Tooltips wisely. Put them where they make sense. So, let's try putting some on our Tab Control. We'll go into Layout Mode, and you can put them right on here, and it's important to note that when you click on a tab, notice how it doesn't have that little black rectangle, but when I click again, then it does? Click over here, you have to click again to make sure that tab's selected. That's how you assign a Tooltip to it. And we'll come in here and say, Set Tooltip. We'll put Enter billing information. Again, not the best message in the world, but you're getting the idea here. So, we'll select that, copy it, because it's basically going to be the same one for each tab. We'll come in here and Set Tooltip here, we'll Paste, change that to Shipping, click OK, keep going down the line here, and then I'll paste with the keyboard command, Notes. Then we'll go back up here to Set Tooltip, Paste again, and this one's really not information you're entering so we'll just change this one a little bit. Search the Web for this contact. There we go. That looks good. And then we'll go to Media, Set Tooltip, and we'll Paste again, and we'll even say Enter pictures or movies. We'll just take the word information out and put movies instead, and we can include Sound there as well. OK. Let's try that and see how it works. Hover over each one, you should get a different message. That looks pretty good. So, let's try creating a calculated Tooltip. We've already been creating calculated Tooltips, it's just we've been putting static text in there. So, we're going to go to Shipping, we're going to go to Format, Set Tooltip. This time we're going to click Specify, and notice that you have all that information in quotes. That's because this is a calculation dialog, even though back here it doesn't look like one, it really is. That's why you have to put quotes around it. But we're going to do something a little bit, hopefully better in this case, and we're going to include information about the customer. So we'll put in, let's say, Name First Shipping, we'll concatenate that with quote space quote, and then Name Last Shipping, concatenate that with quote, that paragraph symbol that you can get right here. I just use a keyword command. And again, you don't have to use quotes around a single paragraph symbol, but once you get more than one you do. We're going to hit a couple of returns and we'll decide to put, let's say, their address. And then we'll concatenate that. There we go, and then we'll do City, there we go, and then we'll go down to State, and then, with a space, and then we'll do the Postal Code Shipping. Make sure they all have S's. Looks like it's good. We'll click OK. It accepts that. Click OK again. Let's go to Browse Mode and see what that does. While we're on billing, we can look over without clicking on this tab and see what the shipping information is. Let's change that a little bit. Let's change it to Fairlane Avenue so you can prove that it really works. Come back to Billing, hold over that, there we go, and you can see that it says Avenue, so it's different than what we have here. So that might be a nifty way to do that, and you can put calculated Tooltips all over the place. Your most common will be just static text, but you can take it to a whole new level and do some interesting things as we'll see in the Intermediate Tutorial. We'll do some more extensive calculations on Tooltips.