FileMaker Pro 8: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Organizing and Editing Records

With all its advanced database options—like Find mode in this chapter and the relational database features covered in the later parts of this book—FileMaker is a pretty good deal for $279. But you’re getting way more for your money than a powerhouse database program. FileMaker has many of the capabilities of a basic word processor built right in, so you can unleash your creative text-formatting urges using tools that look and feel quite familiar. What you can do with FileMaker is limited only by your imagination and willingness to plunge into a few dialog boxes.

Once you have even a few records entered into your database, clicking through them all whenever you want to make changes gets cumbersome. This chapter shows you how to pull up the records you want to work with. Then once you’ve got ‘em, the real fun begins. You’ll find out all the ways you can format text in File-Maker to get just the right look for your project, and how to print it out on paper.

Views

In the Contact Management database example, you learned how to add to and edit your new database with only one record onscreen at a time (Section 1.5.3). This view is a common way to look at your information, but it’s far from the only way. In fact, there are three possible ways to look at a database: Form view, List view, and Table view.

The one-at-a-time approach to viewing records you saw in Chapter 1 is called Form view. In List view, you see lots of records in, well, a list. If they ...