About This Book

FileMaker Pro comes with a printed manual and an impressive online help system. These are actually pretty helpful resources—if you’re a programmer, that is, or if you’ve been working with FileMaker for a while. Between the manual and the help system, you can figure out how FileMaker works. But you’ll have to jump back and forth between page and screen to get the complete picture. And neither source does a great job of letting you know which features apply to the problem you’re trying to solve.

This book is designed to serve as the FileMaker Pro manual, the book that should have been in the box. It explores each feature in depth, offers shortcuts and workarounds, and explains the ramifications of options that the manual doesn’t even mention. Plus, it lets you know which features are really useful and which ones you should worry about only in very limited circumstances. Try putting sticky tabs in your help file or marking the good parts with a highlighter!

FileMaker comes in several flavors, and this book addresses them all. FileMaker Pro, the base program, takes up most of the book’s focus. FileMaker Pro Advanced is an enhanced version of the program. Like the name promises, it contains advanced tools and utilities aimed at making development and maintenance of your databases easier. Its features are covered in Chapter 12 and 19. FileMaker Server lets you share your databases more safely and quickly than FileMaker Pro’s peer-to-peer sharing. Learn about Server in Chapter 18.

About the Outline

FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual is divided into seven parts.

  • Part One: Introduction to FileMaker Pro. Here, you’ll learn about FileMaker Pro’s interface and how you perform basic tasks, like entering data and then sorting through it again. You’ll also find out how FileMaker Pro stores your data inside fields and then organizes those fields into units called records. You’ll see how to define fields and make them do some of the data entry work for you.

  • Part Two: Layout Basics. Just as your actual data is organized into fields and records, the appearance of your database is organized into layouts. FileMaker Pro provides a whole raft of tools that make creating layouts fast and powerful. You’ll find out how to use layouts to make data entry easier and how to create layouts that list and summarize your data.

  • Part Three: Multiple Tables and Relationships. When you’re storing lots of different types of data in a database, it’s helpful to organize types of data using FileMaker’s tables. And when you have more than one table, you need to figure out how the information in one table relates to the information in another. You’ll learn how to create, connect, and manage multiple tables and how to set up complex relationships that show you just the data you need to see.

  • Part Four: Introduction to Calculations. Most databases store lots of numbers, but the most important information in your database comes from performing some kind of math on those numbers. You’ll learn how to use FileMaker Pro’s more than 200 functions to do the math for you. Surprisingly, you can also use functions on fields that don’t contain numbers. For example, there are functions for working with text, dates, and times. And some of the most powerful functions are the logical functions, which can perform tests on your data, and then give you results based on what the function finds out.

  • Part Five: Scripting. Because there are so many things you have to do with a database that are repetitive, tedious, or just plain boring, FileMaker Pro provides a way for you to automate those tasks using scripts. You’ll start with simple steps that teach you how scripting works, and learn how to make scripts for people to use. You’ll see how to use scripts to work with fields and records, or with windows, or even with entire database files. And you’ll explore more complex techniques, like making scripts pass information to one another and nesting scripts within other scripts.

  • Part Six: Security and Integration. FileMaker knows your data’s important enough to keep it safe from prying eyes. In this section, you’ll learn how to protect your database with passwords and how to use privileges to determine what folks can do once they get into your database. This part also teaches you how to move data into and out of your database and how to share that data with other people and even with other databases. In the final chapter, you’ll see the design and development tools provided in FileMaker Advanced to speed creation time and give you more control over how your database works.

  • Part Seven: Appendixes. No book can include all the information you’ll need for the rest of your FileMaker career. Well, it could, but you wouldn’t be able to lift it. Eventually, you’ll need to seek extra troubleshooting help or consult the program’s online documentation. So, at the end of the book, Appendix A explains how to find your way around FileMaker’s built-in help files and Web site. It also covers the vast online community of fans and experts: People are the best resource of all for fresh ideas and creative solutions. Appendix B lists File-Maker error codes.

Living Examples

Each chapter contains living examples—step-by-step tutorials that help you learn how to build a database by actually doing it. If you take the time to work through these examples at the computer, you’ll discover that these tutorials give you invaluable insight into the way professional developers create databases. To help you along, online database files provide sample data for you to work with and completed examples against which to check your work.

You can get these files any time from the “Missing CD” page (see “About Missing Manuals.com" on About → These → Arrows). To download, simply click this book’s title, and then click the link for the relevant chapter.

Macintosh and Windows

FileMaker Pro works almost precisely the same in its Macintosh and Windows versions. Every button in every dialog box is exactly the same; the software response to every command is identical. In this book, the illustrations get even-handed treatment, alternating between Windows Vista and Mac OS X.

One of the biggest differences between the Mac and Windows versions is the keystrokes, because the Ctrl key in Windows is the equivalent of the Macintosh ⌘ key.

Whenever this book refers to a key combination, you’ll see the Windows keystroke listed first (with + symbols, as is customary in Windows documentation); the Macintosh keystroke follows in parentheses (with-symbols, in time-honored Mac fashion). In other words, you may read, “The keyboard shortcut for saving a file is Ctrl+S (⌘-S).”

About → These → Arrows

Throughout this book, and throughout the Missing Manual series, you’ll find sentences like this one: “Open your Home → Library → Preferences folder.” That’s shorthand for a much longer instruction that directs you to open three nested folders in sequence, like this: “In the Finder, choose Go → Home. In your Home folder, you’ll find a folder called Library. Open that. Inside the Library window is a folder called Preferences. Double-click to open it, too.”

Similarly, this kind of arrow shorthand helps to simplify the business of choosing commands in menus, as shown in Figure I-2.

When you read in a Missing Manual, “Choose View → ‘Go to Layout’ → Clients,” that means: “Click the View menu to open it, and then click ‘Go to Layout’ in that menu, and then choose Clients in the resulting submenu.”

Figure I-2. When you read in a Missing Manual, “Choose View → ‘Go to Layout’ → Clients,” that means: “Click the View menu to open it, and then click ‘Go to Layout’ in that menu, and then choose Clients in the resulting submenu.”

About Missing Manuals.com

At www.missingmanuals.com, you’ll find news, articles, and updates to the books in this series. Click the “Missing CD-ROM” link to reveal a chapter-by-chapter list of the databases referred to in the book.

If you click the name of this book and then the Errata link, you’ll find a unique resource: a list of corrections and updates that have been made in successive printings of this book. You can mark important corrections right in your own copy of the book, if you like.

In fact, the same page offers an invitation for you to submit such corrections and updates yourself. In an effort to keep the book as up-to-date and accurate as possible, each time we print more copies of this book, we’ll make any confirmed corrections you’ve suggested. Thanks in advance for reporting any glitches you find!

In the meantime, we’d love to hear your suggestions for new books in the Missing Manual line. There’s a place for that on the Web site, too, as well as a place to sign up for free email notification of new titles in the series.

Safari® Enabled

When you see a Safari® Enabled icon on the cover of your favorite technology book, that means it’s available online through the O’Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf.

Safari offers a solution that’s better than e-books: it’s a virtual library that lets you easily search thousands of top tech books, cut and paste code samples, download chapters, and find quick answers when you need the most accurate, current information. Try it for free at http://safari.oreilly.com.

Get FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.