FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner Tutorials
Creating a Database / Modifying and Organizing Fields
Subtitles of the Movie (FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner / Creating a Database / Modifying and Organizing Fields)
It's going to take you awhile to learn everything Manage Database can do. So we're going to continue on with learning how Manage Database works, we're going to go beyond creating fields and the simple options we learned before. We're going to learn things about duplicating and deleting and generally organizing this Manage Database to work more efficiently. So we're going to start with Changing the Field Type. I'm going to come up here to the Address 2 and I'm going to change the field type. I'm going to come over here and change it to a Date Field, there's no reason to do this but I want you to see what happens. It's easily done; you just hit Change and notice it will give you some kind of error message here. Basically it says you might mess up the data, you know it, it may not be true but it's giving you a warning, proceed anyhow. We don't have to worry about this because we don't have any data plus we're going to change this back to a Text Field anyhow. So that's very easy to do and notice the only time you have to hit this Change Button is when you change the name as we did in the previous section or the type. When you go into Options and do something, you know like let's say we turn on Creation Date or something like that we don't have to hit Change, it maybe a little confusing at first but those will in, include comments in that as well if you have the comment you have to change as well. Otherwise the Options are just you know, you don't have to hit Save. It, it assumes when you're clicking OK here that, that's your save. Let's try deleting a field, so I'm going to come over here and delete the Address 2 Field. Now when you hit Delete, it's going to permanently delete the selected field and all of its data. It no longer be on any layout, it'll no longer be in any scripts, any calculations, it will no longer be referenced anywhere. It will be completely gone as well as all the data so it's, it's a permanent delete. And it's different than if you're on the Layout as we were in the last section where you just simply could delete a field of the layout, that's just a representation of that field on that layout. This is the schema we're working with in Manage Database, realize you delete it from here, it's gone from everywhere. So we're going to go ahead and delete it, it's gone; we still have a chance to get it back as we'll see at the end here. So let's go into some other features, let's talk about moving fields. If I want this Date of Birth Field to be up here, I simply drag by those little arrows, get it to where I want it, drop it and it's there. And if you didn't see that, it changed from Creation Order to Custom Order. I can switch back to Creation Order and this is the order in which I created those fields and I can go back to Custom Order if I want and that's the customize order I arrange them in. I can even go to Alphabetize by Field Name which is probably my favorite view. You also have by Field Type so you can get all the Text Fields, all the Date Fields and all the Timestamp Fields in a row. So let's switch back to Field Name and realize that you see that up here you can actually click and sort by these areas here and if you click a second time it'll switch from Ascending to Descending. So you can do that in both ways here but this is a little bit different. This switches between your different options, your options and your comments. So notice we have that comment next to Company right here, I don't really prefer this view, I like to see the Options here, but if you like that, it's there, you can look at it that way. It's up to you how you look at the data; you just need to understand how you can work with this. But I'm going to switch it back to Field Name and one more thing I want to say about this View By here, is this determines, this Manage Database and what View By you have set here or have clicked on along here, determines how you view fields in other dialogs such as putting a field on a layout. I usually want them in alphabetical order not in creation order because then I can do a think like this. I can go P H and it goes right to Phone and I can quickly find that. I don't have to scroll up and down if you have 100 fields and try to find it. I can just type the letter quickly get there because creating a database for me is all about efficiency. If you can create more databases then I can actually create more money. So it's important when you come out of Manage Database to know what your View By is or to realize that if you have a dialog and it's not in alphabetical order, well it's because Manage Database is not in alphabetical order. And so I often switch it back to Field Name whenever I leave, even if I'm switching it to Creation Order to, to try and remind myself what was the last couple of fields I created, I'll switch it right back to Field Name right away. Now there's also a nice feature here called Print down here. It prints only to the selected fields so if I Shift-Click on these four fields and hit Print, only those four fields will print. If you want to select all of them, well you can do a Command A or a Control A and select all of them but realize it will only print the ones that are selected. And also realize that we have another option here which is this Duplicate, if I come in and duplicate let's say our Timestamp Create, it's very easy to make some changes here to make it another field. I can go into Options, change it to that and that maybe faster than actually creating that field from scratch, it's up to you. So there are some efficiency techniques for the Manage Database if you want to use them. I suggest becoming very familiar with this and you will as you use it but concentrate, play around these features a little while, get used to it. So you really know how to use this dialog because you're going to be going in and out of it a lot. Now the last thing that I want to show is, we're going to hit Cancel here. Instead of OK which will save these, I'm going to hit Cancel; it'll say Do you want to discard all these changes? Well, if I hit Cancel it will go ahead and not, you know cancel the changes. But if I hit Discard, it's going to discard all the changes since we last came into Manage Database. So if we come back in here, we'll see what happened here. You see our Address 2 Field is back to a Text Field and back in here completely. We'll see that we have no Timestamp Mod 1, all those things that we did since the last time we came in here are gone, so that's an easy way to go back to what you were. Remember how that works, so you can take away a bunch of changes that you didn't really want to do.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | FileMaker Pro 12: Beginner |
| Author: | John Mark Osborne |
| SKU: | 34323 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-046-6 |
| Release Date: | 2012-06-08 |
| Duration: | 16 hrs / 169 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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