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FileMaker Pro 10: Intermediate Tutorials

Interface Design / Sub-Areas pt. 1

Subtitles of the Movie

Here's what your fields should look like once they're all on the layout. You want your billing here, your shipping here and your date of birth and your category down here. They don't have to be exactly like this, but close to this because we're going to put some engraving around here to offset this more. The spacing already does give you an indication that this is separate information from this and this and from this and from this, but I'd like to offset it even more, differentiate it even more and so we're going to add some graphics here to do some engraving. So in order to do that, we're going to go over to the FileMaker Reference. And we're going to come down here and locate some graphics and we'll keep going here. Let's see if we can find them. There they are; right here. Now, you don't have access to the FileMaker Reference but you do have access to the Work Files and as you notice, these weren't in that Photoshop.jpg file. But they are in the Work Files in the ending version of the Contact Manager. So let's go to the Work Files, look at the end for this chapter and you'll see these graphics and can grab them and can put them into your version. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into Layout Mode here, come back to the FileMaker Reference and we'll drag each one of these on there; right there, get it right where we want it and we'll get the one that goes below, one that goes on the right, one that goes on the top and we'll move this a little bit over more. Now we need to get these ones. These are the corners. There we go. Kind of putting them approximately where they need to go. And then we can go ahead and get rid of this. We'll hide this window and now we can start putting them closer where they should be. They should be in that corner, this over here. Don't worry about them matching up exactly right now. Get this one right there. Put this one right there. And that one right there and then this one right here and there we go. So we just want to get an approximation of where they should go. And you want to have enough space here and here and enough room to have the same space here and there. And that looks like it will probably work. So what we're going to do is come in here and duplicate these. So the first thing we have to do is get this lined up right here. So we get that right in the right spot and in here you can usually do it at 100 percent, but if you're unsure, just zoom up to 400 percent and you can make sure this is exactly in the right spot. Once you've got that, you can duplicate it; 123456, move it over until it gets just in the right spot and then we can zoom back down and use the keyboard command to keep duplicating or Smart Duplicating and get it right about, that's good enough. I think what I'm going to do is move this to match up with it and we'll zoom back up again, mov it there. That looks pretty good. Zoom back down and now we can do these, get them right in the right spot and I'm going to do both of these at the same time. Zoom back up there. Those both look good and what I'm going to do is zoom back down, select both of them, duplicate them together, 123456, move them down, zoom in, keep going down. That looks perfect. There we go. And then duplicate them down as far as I need them. That looks like it'll probably work. So let's now come down here and do the bottom part. We can match that up, move it up one pixel, move this one over here, move it over one pixel. That looks pretty good. Now we can move this one in here, get it just right and I'll zoom in just to make sure, move it up, move it over, there's perfect. We'll duplicate it, 123456, mov it over. There we go. Zoom out, duplicate it and it should match up right with this one perfectly. And it looks like it did. And just checking it over, it looks pretty good. So now what we want to do is take a look at it in Browse Mode. And that's looking pretty good. It's not perfect yet. I'd like to center it a little bit more and put some other things on here, but I'm pretty happy with the results. So what we're going to do is go into Layout Mode. We're going to try to select all of these objects. So I'm going to hold down the Shift Key while I draw the selection rectangle and draw it over here and then draw it over here. You can then group these together, arrange group and just as a test I'm going to mov them a little bit. Yup, looks like they're done. I'll undo that and now what I can do is center it just perfect but it's actually looking pretty good here. I'm not sure there's much I need to do with it. I do need a little space down here, so I'm going to move these down, get them down there. I'm actually going to make more space than I need, so let me move it down. I'm going to move these closer together as well. And that way I can move all of this, plus this down a little bit so I can put a label above it. So I want it to say Billing right up here. So I get my Text Tool, I'm going to go back to Browse Mode here real quick, check it out and make sure it looks good. Yeah, it does look good so we'll show this, go to Layout Mode, get our Text Tool and we'll type in Billing. Click out of it, maybe make this a little bit bigger because we want to make the font bigger. I'm going to go to 14 point and then I'm also going to bold it. That looks pretty good. And I like to line this up, so I'm going to select that and we can see these anchor points aren't lined up. So I'll move this over. And let's see how that; one more. And I can see by looking at these anchor points that these two objects are lined up on the left edges. Sometimes there's easier ways than going to use arrange and aligning or distributing, resizing. Sometimes you can do it much easier by just eyeing it out; at least for me that's the way it works well.

Tutorial Information

Course: FileMaker Pro 10: Intermediate
Author: John Mark Osborne
SKU: 33926
ISBN: 1-935320-19-X
Release Date: 2009-01-05
Duration: 15 hrs / 177 lessons
Work Files: Yes
Captions: Available on CD and Online University
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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