Subtitles of the Movie

All three tutorials, the beginner, intermediate and advanced will use a single solution throughout. And the solution I've chosen is an invoicing solution and you should be asking yourself why? Well, there's a very good reason why. I've been doing FileMaker training for about 17 years now and I've found out that having a single solution throughout the entire tutorial helps you to really grasp onto the techniques. If you just see one technique here and one there, well, it doesn't really help you as much if you've seen it in the context of the solution. So what I wanted to do was pick a solution that was familiar to everybody. Everybody knows about invoices and contacts and products and selling those products and printing them. And so you can instantly grab on to what I'm trying to talk about here; the concepts will be easy to understand. If I chose something like, let's say a school solution where we had students and teachers, well, that might be pretty familiar to most people, but I think the buying and selling of products is really the best solution out there for everybody to understand. And what you want to imagine here in this situation is this is an invoice that really is geared towards a business where you buy and sell multiple things; almost like a storefront. I actually use an invoicing solution in my business where I sell products and services and so this is how this is designed to work, this invoicing solution. Now, there are many kinds of invoicing solutions, but I wanted to take the most simple, the easiest to understand approach to an invoicing solution because that will help us get into all the different techniques we want and cover things that everybody wants to know. And so the invoicing solution is simple enough to create a complete solution, yet complicated enough to show advanced techniques. That's really my point here is that you can do anything you want in an invoicing solution. It has so many aspects to it, so it's really quite well suited for this. And the great thing is is that anything you cover in an invoicing solution really applies to any other solution you might make. For instance, just about every solution that's at least a couple of tables will have a many-to-many relationship and a one-to-many relationship. You'll have portals, you'll have related fields, you'll have scripts, calculations. You know, we can show all these things inside of an invoicing solution and you can take it and with very few changes, apply it to whatever solution you need to do. It really does work that well. Once you learn how to do a many-to-many relationship in an invoicing solution, you can take and you will understand how to apply that to any solution with a many-to-many relationship. It really is that what you see in an invoicing solution can really be replicated into any solution. And once you get it, once you understand it and once you've transferred the ideas from the invoicing solution to your solution, you'll really get that. So what we're gong to do is demonstrate an invoicing solution, a solution that I sell commercially. This solution is not unlocked. Ok? It's locked. You will not be able to get into it. It is included in the work files and may be included several times whenever I mention it, but I use this solution to present a goal for the series. Where are we going? I want you to see off in the distance where we're going to get to if you go through all three tutorials. Ok? So if you follow the entire three-part tutorial series, you will have created the invoicing solution I'm going to show you; every little last bit of it. You really will. So you really don't need to have this invoice solution unlocked. You really don't need it because if you go through the whole thing and as I'm doing it, you're building it, you'll get exactly the same product. And again, we're showing it here just so you can see where we're going. So we'll go to the window menu. You'll see invoice. And here is one of the layouts in the invoicing solution. You can see that we have tabs. We have buttons. We have customer information for billing and shipping. We have products. You can add as many products here as you want. We have information about shipping, terms. We have our information about how much they're spending, including shipping and sales tax and all that kind of stuff. It's all here in this section. And so let's start by creating a new record. Now, I could do it from the records menu, because I have complete access to this file, or I could use the button. And really, when you lock out all these menus from the users, because they really shouldn't be going up to the menus and using them if you're making a solution for other people to use, they shouldn't have to know FileMaker to use your solution. You should have a button here. Make it easy for them. So we'll do that. New invoice. Automatically pops up. Your list of customers will likely be longer. We'll choose FileMaker Incorporated. Fills in all the information here. Then we can come down here and choose which parts we want to sell them. Maybe a Tiffany dragonfly lamp. And maybe they want, uh, two of these. And when you're done, you'll see the totals show up here at the bottom. You can choose the status of it, whether it's billed or paid. All their information goes in here and is stored in various tables. For instance, this information from customers, and this is from products and there's also a joined table here, which we'll learn about later, which is actually storing this so there's actually a products table and a joined table that joins products to invoices. But we'll get into that. That's fairly complicated stuff. Let's also look at the navigation here. We can go into list view. See all of the invoices are in here. There happen to be, uh, six right now. And we can click on any one of them to view it. So we can go over to here. This one happens to be for FileMaker also. We can go through and walk through these records, these invoice records, and see all of them. There's one for Apple Computer. I can also do a find if I want. I can find all the people that have been billed. Hit continue and it shows me just five. Only one of them is paid right now. Go back here and we can still see those five. You can see this feedback right here. We can walk through them again. So you notice that what we're building here is all the functionality so that people don't have to go to the view menu and choose find mode. Now, you need to know how to do this, but once you learn how to do this you can make buttons and interfaces that do all this stuff so people don't have to know everything about what to do. They don't have to know that you can't search really inside of a global field because they could get into that one in find mode. You just simply set up the script in find mode. You also see there's special filter portals here where I can say, only show me certain values between certain dates. Only show me the paid ones. Only the billed ones. So you can see how this filters. This portal gives you ad-hoc reporting. We can even go over the customer section. Can see all the customers are in here. If I want to find all the companies who are starting with A, I can just hit this button and you see now it changes to 101 and there's Apple Computer. I can go into find mode here as well. There's a filter here as well. All that kind of stuff. I can even pop this up and choose products. I can go right over to the product section. And you have all the information about the products here.