Subtitles of the Movie

One thing that is bothering me about the interface are the field labels. I don't like the bold. It makes it difficult to read and I also don't like the labels. I don't like it that they're not in proper case and I don't like name underscore first. So we're going to go ahead and change these. Remember that field labels are just text blocks. They're just a convenience. FileMaker puts them in when you put a field if you want them, but they're simply text blocks so we can double-click on them and change that to a capital C. We can do four clicks here and type in First Name instead; four clicks again, Last Name; and we can change this to Address space 1; and Address space 2. Change this to City and you get real efficient with this where you click, you notice if I double-click right there that my cursor goes right where I want it so I can spend less time. The more efficient you are the faster you can develop your solution and especially if you're, you know, in business for yourself, running a consulting or training agency, you need to be able to do these things very quickly in FileMaker so that you can basically end up doing more work. So you could call this Zip Code. It doesn't have to match the field here in Manage Database you can call it whatever you want, but I'm going to still call it Postal Code because then that either means Zip Code or Canadian Postal Codes. Then we'll go into Phone, change E-mail. We could put in DOB or, you know what I think, Date of Birth is better here. And then Category. We're going to deal with these later so don't worry about these labels for right now. What I also don't like that these are bold so I'm going to turn them off of bold and I think that looks much better. They don't pop out quite as much and I think they're better to be more subtle. So that looks pretty good. Let's go ahead over to here and change these. Let's make these so that they're not bold, but I do want them underlined I think and these choices are also available from the Style and there's quite a bit more choices here, so look there if you want. And so that looks good. So we'll just come in and do the same changes. There we go. Get that correction there, First Name, Last Name and City and then Phone. There we go. And I'll move this up a little bit. I like it to be kind of over farther than these and that looks good to me and I'm liking this pretty much. Let's go ahead and move these down maybe a little bit. I think they're pretty high here. I'd like them to be a little bit closer to this and I'll give it some more room here and we can move that down. You know, interface is about tweaking things a little bit - a few pixels here, a few pixels there - everybody's got a different opinion, but too much space means they're not together and too little space means that you can't really read what's going on, so getting just the right amount of space between these can make a big difference in the way your Layout appears. So let's go back here. One thing I don't like is how these fields can be entered into. If we go back to Browse Mode and we click into here remember you can't modify these. If we try to change these we'll get this message. That's because we set it up to prohibit modification, so really we shouldn't allow other people to get into these fields at all. So I'm going to go into Layout Mode and we're going to use Merge Fields here. So we're going to get our Text Tool, click and type Created by colon space and then go and insert a Merge Field. All we have to do is find that field Count Create down at the top and then we can type in, let's say, some kind of separator, let's say a pipe character, that might be nice, or any kind of character you want to do, it's up to you and then Create a date/time. There we go, colon and then we'll insert another Merge Field. We'll go to our Time Stamp Create, click OK and you can see how that puts it all on one line. It's in a Merge Field, though, they can't get into it in Browse Mode, but it also gives the advantage of putting this text right there and it's kind of nice, so now, you know, I could put in all the Mod and the Count Mod and stuff like that but I'm going to forego that and just get rid of everything here, highlight it and delete it and then move this into the space. And I might even make that a little bit smaller. It doesn't really have to be the biggest. We'll move down to 10 point, make this a little bit smaller here and it looks pretty good. We can even center it if we wanted to, get it right in there and the easy way to center it into all this stuff would be to make sure that edge is lined up with this and that edge is lined up with that and everything will be centered right between that. And now we have more room. We can move the body part up because you don't really need all that white space there and, as you'll see, it'll make a difference later as we're doing things. So let's look at it in Browse Mode and see what it looks like, and it looks pretty good. Created By, Admin, Created Date and Time and in fact, what we can do if you really want to offset this stuff, we can come in here and either make this bold or this part bold. So I'll choose this. We'll go ahead and make that bold and then make this bold and see how that looks. So you can go in between Browse and Layout Mode you go, hmm, I wonder if I like that. I'm not sure if I like that or not. Maybe you don't like it. It's up to you, but I'm going to leave it so that it's going to make it more obvious what the important information here is. The label's not as important as what is inside that Merge Field.