Subtitles of the Movie

When you exit Define Database or Manage Database, FileMaker places you in Browse mode. Now, there are four different modes that we're going to go over later, bur for right now, you're in Browse mode, and this mode allows you to do data entry. That means typing into fields, creating records, editing fields, all that kind of stuff that you're typically going to do once you've added your fields. So that's why FileMaker places you here. In fact, FileMaker makes it easy for you by creating one record. It doesn't have any data on it, but you can see that over here in the Status area there's one record. Now, there's a lot of information in the Status area that we're going to go over in later tutorials, so don't worry about it for right now. Just look at the fact that we have one record. So we can start doing data entry, you just have to find the fields, and it's not clear where they are right now. From experience, I know they're right here next to these labels, these are the labels telling you that there's a field right here to the right of it. When you click into it you get your field frames, a dark, solid line around the currently selected field where your cursor is blinking, and then dotted lines around the rest of the field so you can see where they are. Now, this isn't a very good interface, it's hard to find them, especially for people who've never used FileMaker before. So in later tutorials, we're going to show you how to make these fields stand out without having to click into them. We'll put some graphics, and background colors, and things like that. But for now, we have a simple database; we're going to work with what FileMaker has, and the field frames really show you where everything is anyhow. So, think of each one of these fields as a mini-word processor, and you can type in it just like you would a word processor. So we can type in the company name and then we can grab the mouse and click anywhere inside this field frame to get to the next field. You can see how once I click into it, the line is solid around the current field and now this is dotted. So we're ready to type into this field. Now, if you don't want to grab the mouse to click down to the next field, well you can type the Tab key, and that's really nice if you're doing a lot of data entry, you don't want to take your hands off the keyboard and grab the mouse, just hit the Tab key real quick. Once we're done typing, just hit Tab and we're down to the next field. And if you happen to tab too far, hit it twice in a row and go down to the State field, you can go back to the City field by hitting Shift Tab. So we'll tab again. Now if you happen to make a mistake, you have all the capabilities of a word processor built right into each one of these fields. So you can hit the Delete or Backspace key, you can use the arrow keys on the keyboard to move your cursor around, you can even insert right where that is, you can even grab the mouse and move it, the cursor to where you want it to be, and you can highlight. So if we highlight this we could either hit the Delete or Backspace key, or start typing right over it. So, think of each field as a mini-word processor; you can do just about anything in there that you want that you would normally do in a word processor. So we'll hit Tab, type in the phone number, Tab again, get the email address in there, and now we're going to Tab again. Now the next field we go to are our auto-enter housekeeping fields. Now you may be wondering why nothing's auto-entered into them. Well, if you remember, we were fiddling around with stuff, and we actually exited Define Database, which is when the creation of this record occurred and then we went back into Define Database and added these fields. So these were added after this record was created, so that's why they have no data in them. And if you remember, we said "Do not allow modification." So if I try to type into here, you'll see that this field cannot be modified. You'll also notice that our Date of Birth, or DOB field is not the layout. While we were messing around with preferences and turning off that option to automatically add newly defined fields to the layout. Well we went through a process and added the field, and deleted it, and all that stuff. So after we took off that preference option, that's when we finally added DOB for the last time, and that's why it didn't get added to the layout. So, we will go over layouts and what they mean, and how they work, but essentially right now you have one layout, one view, one interface for your database and not all the fields have to be on that layout. You don't have to view all the fields at once, you might have just these fields up here, we might even take off the auto-enter fields. So those fields still exist inside of your database, they're just not on this particular view. So again, we'll go over layouts later. So now we can create a new record because we have one and we want to enter more, of course. So we can go to the Records menu and choose New Record if we want, or we could use the keyboard equivalent, which is Command or Apple N on the Macintosh, or Control N on Windows. Or, you could even go to the toolbar if you like, and you'll see that this icon right here is for new record. And watch this area, after we click it watch what happens here. You'll see now we have two total records, and we can go ahead and start entering. Now I don't want to spend all day here entering records, so we're going to import some data in here so we have something to work with in our database. But I do want to point something out before we do that. Look down here at our Auto-enter fields, we have the Time Stamp Create, Time Stamp Mod, Account Create, Account Mod. Now, when I exit all my fields after I'm done editing. In other words, when I'm done editing, I click Out anywhere over here, you'll see that this modification date and time will update. And every time we modify it, such as entering an address here. Not when we tab to the next field, only when we exit all fields, and that would also happen if we went to the previous record. So we could go to this record, you'll notice it all of a sudden has modification time because we had modified it before but we had switched records, it was too quick to see. But when we come back here, you'll notice that this has been updated. So any time you go away from the record or exit by clicking out here, that will update that modification and it also updates the account modification, but it happens to be the same security access as when we actually created it, so it's not going to change unless somebody else logs on and makes a change. And we'll get into security later.