Subtitles of the Movie

Let's talk about the Status area. It's this area over on the left where I'm circling right now, so it actually takes up the whole left side of your FileMaker window. And what you're going to be working with the most is the Rolodex, which is this area right here. This allows you to go backwards and forwards march through your records. So you have a right arrow and a left arrow. So if I wanted to go to the next record, I click it once, and we're on the next record, and you actually see the record number changing. If I want to go backwards, I click on this one. So it's a simple little process to walk through your records. You can also go down to the slider here, and you can actually grab this and move quite a few records at a time, and you'll see the record number changing as I move it. And as soon as you're at the records you want to be at, you let go and you're transported right into that record. You can even go down into this little area, right into the record number area and type in the record you want. We can type in 1, and then hit the Return or Enter key, and you go right to that record. You can see how now that Rolodex is dim because we're on the first record and there's no records before that. Well, at least there's no records before that in the found set. There actually are two records before this one, the ones that we entered. But after we imported, we got those records in a found set, which is what this is displaying here, but the records we entered are not gone, they're just not being viewed right now. You can see that they're there because we have a total of 43 records. So we'll be working with found sets in later tutorials, for right now just realize this is where that information appears about what you're currently looking at. And so you'll be coming over to the Status area quite a bit to see, well what am I looking at right now? How many records do I have found? How many total do I have? Right below this is whether your database is sorted or unsorted. So we will be going sorted as well, but this is how you basically make things in alphabetical, or numerical, or chronological order. So if you happen to sort them, well then it'll say sorted rather than unsorted. So if they're unsorted, they're actually in what's called Creation Order, the order in which you created them. So the first record created is at the beginning and the last record created is at the end. And if we sort them they're in a different order, likely by name, maybe alphabetical like this. There's also one other type here called semi-sorted that you'll see, so there's three types: sorted, unsorted, and another type called semi-sorted, which means that you sorted the database and then manipulated the records in that found set. You could have added a record, or you might have edited one of the records, or even gone ahead and done something else that might have modified so that the sort wasn't accurate anymore. So, then you get a lot of blank space here. You will sometimes see some buttons show up here, we'll get into that later, but for the most part this is empty, which is why developers often like to hide this area because there's unused status area. There's unused space, you can't really do anything with it. So what they do is they come down here, and through scripting, although this is a manual way to do it, you can click on this button and hide that status area. And you can replicate with calculations and all kinds of things all the information you have here inside this area on the layout. So they like to hide this, regain that status area of lost space and maximize their screen real estate, but we're going to keep it showing for right now. And right next to these are the number 100 and what I like to call the Little Mountain and the Big Mountain. So if you click on the Little Mountain, you'll see the 100, which is 100% zoom, change to a lesser amount, 75% of real size. You can even go down further if you want, now you're at 50%. And then you can also go up, you can go to 150% of size, 200, 300, 400, and that's as high as you can go, you see it dims out, and if you don't want to click this 3 or 4 times to get back down to 100, just click on this and you'll go right back down to 100%. Now, we skipped a few things in the status area such as the layout menu. The reason we haven't covered it is because we only have one layout and we really haven't talked exactly what layouts are and created any. But layouts are views of your information and can display tables, and fields, and records, and all that kind of stuff. But we'll get into this layout menu later. And then above it you have your mode. Here's Browse mode, and here's the other three modes that you have. And you can click on these buttons to change the different modes. And it tells you what mode you're currently in here by the icon and by this word here. And as well down here, you have the word Browse. That also shows you what mode you're in. So we're still working with Browse mode so we're not going to change around, that's why we're not going to cover what happens when you click on this or click on these. Now you can also resize your window, of course, just like any other application or program, and once you resize FileMaker so that the contents are smaller than the window, so you can see that these scroll bars show up. So then you can, of course, scroll up and down, left and right. It's always a good idea though to keep your content in the visible window, you don't want to get scroll bars, in other words. So I usually like to keep it at least this size so you can see everything in there without scrolling because what happens is if you have a scroll bar, sometimes people don't notice is and then they miss that field because they didn't scroll down or they didn't scroll to the right. So it's always a good idea, I think to keep no scroll bars, and if you have more data than you can fit on that screen well you might want to figure out a way to rearrange it or make several layouts, or we'll get into tab control features and other ways to maximize what you can put on the screen, but generally, if this is all the bigger the screen is, this is all the information that should go on it.