July 15th Tips-and-Tricks Event
Discussion notes from June 15th meeting.
Filemaker Tips and Tricks (Brian)
Use SugarSync and DropBox for off-site backups with restore of last 3 if needed!
Check out various ideas from the videos of the February Pause On Error: https://pauseonerror.pbworks.com/Tips-and-Tricks which came from http://twitter.com/campsoftware/filemaker ( This is Hal in Orlando FL )
Freeze Window
This script step freezes the redraw of the window while scripts process in the background. It saves time like crazy! Processing 12000 records took 32 seconds in “real time,” then with the “freeze window” it took 4 seconds! NOTE: It does not work in IWP.
Copy Records
You can copy a record in form view or list view. Choosing Copy from the Edit menu copies the current record in tab delimited format to the clipboard. Add the option (shift on a PC) and it copies the same data from the entire found set! It only copies the fields on the layout. Also we found that Excel has a character limit and would not accept all the data from a larger set so keep an eye our for that.
Find Techniques
We discussed some find techniques and talked about one that would look for “James” in both the first name field and the last name field. You’d enter find mode, then type “James” in first name then create a new find request and type “James” in the last name field. When you hit enter it will find all the records that had “James” as either the first name or the last.
Dates search >[Date] is the same as [Date]…
Put quotes around more-than-one-word searches to find exact matches like =”of the”
Bill demonstrated using auto-enter calcs to format entries–such as phone numbers and social security numbers–no matter what format the user entered it in. Phone number formatting is a simple start of the talk that leads into using Custom Functions to handle them.
On a side topic, Bill showed a custom function that generated HTML5 primitives (boxes, circles, triangles) in a FileMaker web viewer object!
Lotsa cool stuff!
