Subtitles of the Movie

One of the great new features in FileMaker 7 and later versions is the ability to create a new window. It's really easy to do. Just go to the Window menu and choose New Window, and now you have two views, you can see contacts and contacts-2. We're going to close that. This is really necessary since you have the ability to put many tables into one file. You might want to have viewing of two different tables at once in two different windows. It was easy in FileMaker 6 and earlier because each file had one table, so you could simply say show me this file or show me this file and you could have them open side by side. Well now you need this new window feature. But it's not as simple as that, there's a lot more going on and I want you to really look at what's going on and I'm going to help you to do that. So what we're going to do is we're going to go into Find mode here, we're going to search for all last names that begin with S, then we're going to go ahead and sort the records, and so we're going to go ahead and sort by city, that's fine. If you don't already have it over here, move it over. And so now we have six records found and they're also sorted. Let's shrink this up a little bit, then we'll create a new window. Now contacts-2 has exactly the same found set, exactly the same sort order. And what may not be totally evident is that you can change anything inside of this second view or inside the first view and they won't effect each other. Well, except for changing data; obviously if you change data, take that Y off there and exit out, you can see that it takes it off of the other view, and we'll put that back in. But anything else is just fine, I can change the found set, I can come up here and do a find on, well let's say Osborne, hit Find, and that has not modified this view over here. It's now unsorted, it has a different found set, we can even change to a different layout and that does not effect this other window. So let's put it in perspective and give you an example. Let's say you've been working really hard on a found set, it's got multiple find criteria, multiple requests, you might have omitted some records, you have a sort, you've done a whole bunch of work and your boss comes in and says "Hey, I need this right now." And you have to go into your database and do a find. Well rather than ruining all that work you did, open a new window and work in this window, do whatever he wants, print it out, send it to him in an email, whatever you want to do, and then when you're done simply close that and now you have what you were working on before. So there's the power of a new window. It, first of all adopts everything from the current window including the found set, sort order, current record, and the layout you're on, but when you open that new window you can change anything in there and it won't effect the other window. The only thing that will effect it is changing data, deleting records or editing records or adding records.