FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual

Tooltips

Training people, either when you first launch a new database, or when new employees come into your workforce, is a big part of making your database successful. You can have beautiful layouts, bulletproof privilege sets, and complex, well-thought-out scripts, but if folks don’t know how and when to use them, they’ll miss out on the benefits. To spare you the wrath of confused (or worse, frustrated) users, FileMaker Pro Advanced has a feature called tooltips. Like the onscreen labels that pop up in Windows and many other programs, tooltips can help guide people through the features you’ve created for them, and maybe even cut down on training time.

You can attach tooltips to any object, or group of objects, that you can select on a layout: fields, text, or graphics. Although you need FileMaker Pro Advanced to create tooltips, they work in any version of FileMaker, and even in the Web browser when you use Instant Web Publishing.

To create a tooltip, go to Layout mode and choose the object you want decorate. Then choose Format → Set Tooltip. Enter the text for your tooltip, and then click OK. Now people see the tooltip when the mouse hovers over the object in Browse mode. Just like tooltips in other applications, the tooltip doesn’t appear immediately, so as not to inconvenience more advanced users. You can see a tooltip in action in Figure 19-14.

Figure 19-14. Top: With a tooltip ...