Subtitles of the Movie

In the previous tutorial, the Beginner tutorial, we created a fully-functional Contact Manager; the one you see in front of you. It doesn't have a ton of features but enough to satisfy a basic user. It also has a decent interface created entirely with FileMaker tools. We want to go over this just to recap what we've done so we can go on and create a different interface, create different features, create the complete invoicing solution. But if you want to see this file, this completed file from the Beginner tutorial, it's actually in the Work Files for the start of this particular chapter. So let's take a look at what we've done here. You can see that our interface includes a lot of things. We have a basic blue, yellow and blue and we did that really quickly by selecting the part and changing the fill color. We also have quite a few buttons. We have one that takes you between different layouts and you can see how we've lined this up with the object info so that it doesn't move around. You can see how that when we switch between these, these stay in the same spot and that's really easy to access here by just clicking this and using this to click on an object and move it to where you want it to be. We also have quite a few scripts here. We have a find script, a new contact, a delete contact and probably our most complicated script we created, the Print Form script which is a series of script steps. We even have navigation buttons here and we also have a recreation of the status area. We recreated that so that we could hide this area up here. So that we could gain all that space up there and use more for our solution. We can fill up this whole screen if we want or if we had a higher resolution, fill up even more and so since we don't need everything inside of the status toolbar, then we decided to recreate the most important information, which is how many records are found and what record are we on. And also these buttons right here which correspond to these buttons right here. All this other stuff is also being recreated right down here. We have pop-up menus, we've done some embossing and engraving on the interface. We have tab control. We have all sorts of things here that we've created to make this work much better. So hopefully you enjoy taking a look at this Contact Manager and reviewing it and if you've gone through the Beginner tutorial, you should have already built this and you want to build it so you have that retention. You don't want to just follow along and watch these tutorials. You want to actually build the files that we're building because that will help you with your retention. We also went in and built things like reports. We have anything that's printed is really a report so we have a simple Print Form report, a list report. Then we get into labels, 5160 labels. We had a merge letter, we had an envelope printing layout and then we had some sub-summary reports and also a complicated sub-summary report that used calculations and columns and things like that. So we did quite a bit in the Beginner tutorial and you want to make sure you're familiar with these items before you go on with the rest of the Intermediate tutorial. So what we're going to do is continue on with building the invoice solution. Right now we just have a Contact Manager but we're going to morph it into a Contact Manager with an invoicing solution and products and all that kind of good stuff. So let's take a look at our goal. We showed this before, the invoicing solution which is our goal for the whole project. We have it here again and when we open it up we'll see that we have our invoice solution. We haven't done any of this yet at all but we're going to start doing this in the Intermediate tutorial. And if we switch over to customers, we'll see here is our customers or Contact Manager. You can see how much nicer the interface looks. We've used a program like Photoshop to create all these 3D looking graphics and we've copied and pasted them or inserted them into FileMaker. That's because it just gives it a little bit more flavor, a little bit more professional look than what you can do with just the standard FileMaker tools. So our job here is to take and create this interface, design our Contact Manager to look like this and then go on to the invoicing solution and do all that kind of stuff. In fact, we're even going to give you these graphics that you see here so you don't have to use Photoshop because we're not going to go into Photoshop and show you how to create these. That's a job for you to watch another tutorial, some other tutorial which is on Photoshop or some other graphics program and create these yourself. But we will give you these graphics and show you details about how we created them so you can make them work better in FileMaker. So as we go through this, you'll see that we actually create this entire solution. We'll continue on creating this entire solution when we get into the Advanced tutorial, but we're really going to start making it look just like this in the intermediate solution. So get prepared. We're going to go much faster in the Intermediate tutorial, move much more complicated scripts. We're going to do everything we can to make it look just like this solution right here.