In Form view, you see only one record at a time. If you want to see the next record, you must click the pages of the Book icon, press Control-down arrow, or use some other method of switching records (see Section 1.6.1). Most of the database work you’ve done so far has been in Form view. You might use Form view when you have a lot of information to see about one record, or if you want to focus on just one record without being distracted by all the other records.

List view works almost exactly like Form view. It shows your layout complete with its pretty design, but instead of limiting you to one record at a time, it shows you multiple records in a scrolling list. It also adds another element of feedback to the status area, as shown in Figure 2-2.

When you’re working with a group of records—updating one field in several records or browsing through all your records in search of something—List view comes in handy.

Figure 2-2. The little white strip along the right edge of the status bar tells you you’re in List view. Its job is to show you which record is currently selected. The strip is filled with black along the edge of the current record. In this example, the first record is selected.

If List view looks a lot like Form view, then Table view…well…doesn’t. This view appeals to spreadsheet fans since it offers a consistent rows-and-columns design, the ability to sort with the click of a button, and the freedom to rearrange columns by dragging them around. Of course, like any self-respecting view, you can use Table view to add, edit, delete, and find records too.

When you put your layout into Table view, any graphical embellishments disappear. Instead, FileMaker displays the fields of your layout in a no-nonsense, spreadsheet arrangement (Figure 2-3).

Each column represents one of your fields, and the order of the columns matches the order you go through the fields when tabbing. For example, the first column is the field you wind up in if you press Tab for the first time. Another Tab takes you to the second column.

Figure 2-3. In Table view, FileMaker ignores your layout’s extra pictures, text, and other embellishments and shows you just the fields. Like a real spreadsheet, you can drag columns around to rearrange them. You can also click the header at the top of any column to instantly sort the records by that field. Table view shows the same vertical white strip that you see in List view.

In Table view, you can move columns around by dragging them. To switch the First Name and Last Name columns, for example, do the following:

The column headings also make it easy to sort your data, as shown in Figure 2-4.

If you know what you don’t want better than what you do want, you can use the Omit checkbox. This feature comes in handy when the records you’re looking for can best be described by what they aren’t. For example, “every person who isn’t from California” is a lot easier to say than “everyone from Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado…” In this case, you can get what you want by creating one find request, with California in the State field. Then, before you perform the find, simply turn on the Omit checkbox, which appears in the status area only when you’re in Find mode (Figure 2-5). That’s all there is to it. FileMaker starts with every record in the found set, then throws out all the records with “California” in the State field, so you’re left with everything else.

Omit also works with multiple find requests (see the box on Section 2.2.1.3). If all your requests have the Omit option set, then all the records that match any of your requests are thrown out. Whatever’s left over goes in your found set. If you have a mix of requests with and without Omit set, FileMaker first finds all the records that match your normal requests. It then discards any that match an Omit request. You’re finally left with a found set in which every record matches at least one of your requests, and doesn’t match any of your Omit requests.

Constraining the found set

Suppose you’ve just created a great product, and want to send out some free samples to see how people like it. You can’t afford the postage to send everyone in your database a sample, so you decide to start with a smaller sampling—just people named Smith.

Figure 2-5. Find mode offers up some new status area options. The Omit checkbox basically tells FileMaker to do an un-find: It finds all the records that don’t look like your request. The Symbols give you more control over how FileMaker decides it’s found a match. They’re described in detail starting on Section 2.2.1.3.

Problem is, your database has hundreds of Smiths. Some quick math in your head reveals that it’s still too expensive. How about sending samples to just the Smiths in California? You could go back to Find mode and construct a request to find this criteria instead (by putting Smith in the First Name field and California in the State field), but there’s an easier way. After all, you’ve already got all the Smiths in your found set. What you really want to do is search inside this found set for all the records with California in the State field.

Here’s how the procedure goes:

1. Switch to Find mode, type Smith in the Last Name field, and then press Enter.

   FileMaker searches the database and, in Browse mode, shows you the records with Smith for the last name. You glance at the status area—678 records! You now need to search through these records for the ones whose state is California. That’s exactly what the Constrain Found Set command does.

2. Immediately switch to Find mode again using any of the methods described on Section 1.6.3 .

   In other words, don’t choose Records → Show All Records, and don’t do anything to tamper with the current found set (678 records, in this example). You’re now in Find mode again, ready to enter a request.

   Note

   In Find mode, there’s no way to see what your current found set is. You just have to remember that you last searched for Smith. If you need to see the found set, just switch back to Browse mode and flip through the records.

3. Type California in the State field.

   Since the found set already has only Smiths in it, there’s no need to repeat that information.

4. Choose Requests → Constrain Found Set.

   FileMaker searches out the people from California, but this time it only looks in the current found set. In the end, you get what you want with less typing.

Warning

Once you’re in Find mode, FileMaker is itching for you to perform a find. If you just press Enter, it assumes you want to throw away your last found set and make a new one. Once it’s gone, there’s no way to return to the old found set and constrain or extend it. Likewise, if you accidentally choose the wrong command from the Requests menu, there’s no going back. If you want to constrain or extend, be sure you choose wisely or you’ll have to start all over again.

Normally, FileMaker uses a pretty simple rule to decide whether a field value matches the field in your request (the criteria): If every word in the criteria appears at the beginning of any word in the field, FileMaker considers it a match.

For example, if you put “for” in the Note field in a find request, any of these notes would match:

On the other hand, neither of these would match:

How do you tell FileMaker that you’re looking for “for” wherever it appears in a word, not just at the beginning? You can use a special symbol—a character that has special meaning in a Find request—to stand for part of a word.

The Symbol pop-up menu, which appears in the status area when you’re in Find mode, lets you add these special characters to your searches, thus gaining more control over FileMaker’s decision-making process when it’s looking for records. There are plenty more special symbols, and each is described below.

FileMaker provides a few menu commands to help you fine-tune your found set. Sometimes, after you’ve done the best find request you can, you still end up with a couple of records in the found set that you don’t really want to see. FileMaker offers three commands that make tossing out misfit records as easy as pie.

FileMaker lets you pick more than one field to sort by, which comes in handy when you have lots of records with the same data in some fields. For example, if your People database gets really big, you might have several people with the same last name. If you just sort by last name, there’s no telling in which order the like-named people will fall. In this case, it would help to sort by last name and first name.

When you use more than one sort field, the order the fields appear in the Sort Order list is important, because it determines which field FileMaker uses first. If you sort a list of family members by First Name, then Last Name, you might wind up records ordered like those shown at left in Figure 2-8.

If you sort by Last Name, then First Name, you’ll get something like the window shown at right instead. In the first example, FileMaker sorts everything by First Name. When two people have the same first name, it then uses Last Name to figure out what order those two should be in. In the second example, the records are first sorted by Last Name instead. First Name is then used to figure out how to sort the folks with the same last name.

Figure 2-8. Both windows show the same list of people, but are sorted differently. The one on the left was sorted by first name, then last name. Notice how all the Carolines are together. The data in the window on the right was sorted by last name, then first name. This time, the Fawcetts stick together.

Since the order of the sort fields is so important, FileMaker provides a convenient way to shuffle them around in the Sort Records dialog box after you’ve added them to the Sort Order list. Figure 2-9 sheds some light on how it works.

Figure 2-9. Each field in the Sort Order list has a little double-headed arrow before its name (top). To change the order in which they’re listed, first point to one of the arrows. Notice that your cursor changes shape (middle). FileMaker is letting you know that you can drag the item up or down in the list. Drag the item to its new position (bottom). If you prefer the keyboard, use the arrow keys to highlight the field you want to move. Then press the Ctrl (⌘) key along with the arrow keys to move the selected field. When you’re done, and you click Sort, FileMaker will sort your records using each field in order, starting with the top field in the list.

If you do a multi-field sort and then discover you didn’t get quite what you expected (because you had the fields in the wrong order), just choose Records → Sort Records again, move the fields in the Sort Order list to the right places, and then click Sort.

Like your word processor, FileMaker has a Find and Replace feature. And also as in your word processor, you can (and should) use Find and Replace tools as often as possible to automate your editing process and eliminate retyping.

Suppose one of your clients is called Anderson Consulting. For one reason or another, they decide to change their name to Accenture. Unfortunately, you have 27 folks in your database with the old name. You could look through your records one by one and fix them yourself, but you’re never going to become a database guru that way. Instead, do a Find/Replace operation.

FileMaker fields can hold a lot of information, and it’s not at all uncommon to put things like letters, emails, product descriptions, and other potentially long documents into a field. In cases like this, the Find/Replace command is just as useful as it is in your word processing program.

Since FileMaker has fields and records to worry about, though, its Find/Replace dialog box is a little more complicated that what you may be familiar with. Luckily, the concepts are simple, as shown in Figure 2-10. The Find/Replace dialog box lets you search a field, a record, or all records for a little snippet of text. It can also replace every occurrence of that text with something new—either one at a time, or all at once.

Here’s FileMaker’s version of Find and Replace:

Figure 2-11. The Find/Replace command expects you to give it a Direction. To decipher what that means, you have to do a little visualization. Here’s a picture of the imaginary string, starting at the beginning of the first record, and stopping at the end of the last. When you click into a field, and the insertion point sits there blinking in front of a letter, it’s marking a spot on the imaginary string. If you’re not clicked into a field, FileMaker decides to mark the string right before the first letter of the first field of the current record. In this example, your cursor is sitting right there between “Made” and “Dragon.”

Now that you’re through setting all your Find/Replace options, it’s time to decide which button to click:

Click in the Notes field in the Contact Management database. Notice that when you do, a scroll bar appears on the right side of the field. If you type lots of notes, you’ll be able to scroll through them. FileMaker fields can hold a lot of text. Technically, each field is limited to two gigabytes of data per record, which is a fancy way of saying “way more than you’ll ever need.” (When you design a database, you get to decide which fields have scroll bars, as discussed on Section 4.4.7.2.)

You can enter text into a field in all the usual ways, like typing on your keyboard or pasting text you copied from another field or another program. You can also select text in one field and drag it into another. (In Mac OS X, in fact, you can drag text into a field from any other program.)

In addition to copying and pasting, you can drag text from one place to another. But first, you have to turn it on in FileMaker’s preferences, like so:

Now that dragging is turned on, here’s how it works:

Just like a word processor, FileMaker has commands to set the Font, Size, and Style of the text in a field. (Figure 2-13 shows a field with formatted text.) This feature comes in handy for many reasons. For instance, imagine you have some really important information about a customer (“NEVER PAYS HIS BILL”) that you want to keep in the Notes field. To make sure it gets noticed, you can make it big, bold, and red. You can even use one of those fancy frilly fonts just to keep things interesting.

The formatting commands for font, font size, and type style are in the Format menu. But before you change anything, you’ll notice that all FileMaker fields come with a preset (and pretty boring) standard formatting. (Part 2 of this book explains how you can change this automatic formatting.) Each of the formatting commands covered in this section lets you override the standard formatting for a field on a record-by-record basis.

Figure 2-13. You can format the text in any field just like text in a word processor. FileMaker lets you assign fonts, sizes, styles, colors, and more. You can even adjust paragraph attributes like line spacing, indenting, and alignment. In this record (from the Contact Management database) every field but Email Address has had its contents stylized.

Text Color

The mini–word processor wouldn’t be complete without colors. The Format → Text Color menu gives you a handful of colors to choose from. If you don’t like those options, you can select Other Color (located below all the little color squares in the menu) to pick any color you want, as described in Figure 2-14.

If you don’t like the assortment of colors FileMaker provides, you can change them in the Edit → Preferences (Windows) or FileMaker Pro → Preferences → Layout panel (Mac). You get three choices: System subset, Standard system palette, and Web palette (see Figure 2-14). The normal palette (System subset) gives you 88 colors, which most FileMaker mavens find more than sufficient. It’s also nice because it’s small enough for you to remember what color you’ve been using (“the third red from the top”).

If you find the System subset palette too limiting though, feel free to try one of the others. The Standard system option displays the color palette built into your computer’s operating system—Windows or Mac. Since you’ve probably seen this color arrangement elsewhere on your computer, you may find it easiest to use.

Figure 2-14. The Format → Text Color menu offers a handful of canned color choices. If you’re not happy with the colors you see, you can pick from two other palettes in FileMaker’s Preferences dialog box. Whichever palette you choose determines the selection of colors you get when you choose from the Text Color submenu. Choosing “Standard system palette” gives you the most colors to work with.

The Web palette lets you choose from the set of 216 colors commonly considered Web safe; that is, they’re guaranteed to look pretty much the same in any browser on any computer. At one time, you needed to stick to only these colors if planning to publish your database on a Web site (Chapter 18), but the truth is you don’t really need to worry about Web safe colors anymore. Every computer sold since, oh, about 1997 can display more colors than you ever dreamed of.

Note

The Format → Text Color menu is just one of several places where a color palette shows up in FileMaker. You’ll see the others in Part 2. Just remember that if you change the color palette selection in preferences, the change affects the color palettes throughout FileMaker.

The Text Format Dialog Box

FileMaker provides one-stop shopping for all your text-formatting needs. Suppose you want to change a word to red 13-point bold-italic-underline-uppercase-condensed. That looks to be about seven trips to the Format menu. Instead, choose Format → Text to summon the Text Format dialog box (Figure 2-15). This one little window combines the Font, Size, Style, and Color menus described in the previous pages into one convenient place, turning seven menu commands into one. (Now if only it had a keyboard shortcut.)

Note

The Paragraph button reveals the Paragraph dialog box. It’s covered on Section 2.6.4.

Figure 2-15. The Text Format dialog box (Format → Text) helps cut down your mouse mileage. It combines Font, Size, and Color (exact copies of their counterparts in the Format menu) with individual checkboxes for each style. As you make selections, the text in the Sample box reflects your changes.

Text alignment is perhaps the most important aspect of your document’s appearance. You can have text rigidly justified on both right and left, or with a loose right margin for a more casual look. If you use FileMaker to send party invitations to your contacts, you can use centered alignment for an attractive, social look. People may not think about text alignment much, but it really sets the whole tone of a document. FileMaker puts these settings right on the Format menu.

The Format → Align Text menu offers four useful choices:

Format → Line Spacing lets you single- or double-space the text. Text is singlespaced normally, and if you choose Double instead, FileMaker spreads out your lines of text, giving them a little breathing room. This menu also has a Custom option, which is primarily just a shortcut to the Paragraph dialog box. As you’ll learn on Section 2.6.4, you can use the Paragraph dialog box to control several aspects of text formatting—including more fine-grained control of line spacing.

A FileMaker field is much more than a mere container for plain text. Like a mini– word processor, you can set left and right indents and FileMaker makes sure your text stays between them. You can even set a first-line indent so the first line of each paragraph is automatically indented a little more (or less) than the rest of the text. Finally, you have complete control over tab stops: where they are and which direction the text goes when you tab to them.

The Text Ruler (View → Text Ruler) lets you set indents and tab stops for instant visual gratification. The ruler has an arrow icon for the Left, Right, and First Line indent settings (Figure 2-16), which you just drag to the spot on the ruler where you want the indent set. (For greater precision, you can also set indents in the Paragraph dialog box, as discussed in the next section.) You’ll learn how to set tab stops on Section 2.6.5.2.

When you turn on the Text Ruler, FileMaker adds a space along the top of the window to hold the ruler. When you’re in a field, the ruler itself appears in the portion of this space that is directly above the field, with the zero point on the ruler lined up with the left edge of the field. (When you’re not in a field, the ruler just measures the width of the content area.)

Figure 2-16. Like most word processors, FileMaker has a text ruler that lets you position margin markers right where you want them. When you drag the Left indent arrow, it moves the First Line arrow with it, so first drag the Left indent arrow where you want it, then move the First Line arrow. If you want to move the Left Indent arrow without moving the First Line arrow, hold down the Alt (Option) key while you drag.

This multitalented window offers three groups of settings: Alignment, Line Spacing, and Indents. You can get to the Paragraph dialog box in one of two ways. Either choose Format → Line Spacing → Custom, or choose Format → Text and then click Paragraph. The dialog box opens, as shown in Figure 2-17.

Figure 2-17. The Paragraph dialog box lets you define a paragraph’s alignment, indentation, and a whole lot more. If the Single and Double options in the Format → Line Spacing menu seem lacking, you can use this dialog box to control line spacing precisely. Just enter any number you want in the Height box, and choose your units (lines, inches, centimeters, or pixels). You can also opt to add extra space above or below each paragraph by modifying the Before and After settings.

When your text is positioned and aligned just the way you want it, you have two options: Click OK to make the changes and close the Paragraph dialog box, or click Apply to inspect your changes so far. The Apply button leaves the Paragraph box open, so you can peek at your database window and see how it looks, then continue tweaking. Click OK when you’re satisfied.

Since a field can hold just about any kind of text, you might eventually need to use tab stops within a field. For example, you could have a nice large field into which you paste rows of text from a spreadsheet. To make things line up properly, you can set tab stops for each column of text. To move the insertion point to the next tab, press Ctrl-Tab (Option-Tab). This is a special keystroke, obviously, because in FileMaker pressing Tab jumps you to the next field. See Section 6.4 to learn how Field Controls make plain old tabs work the way you’re used to.

Like most word processing programs, FileMaker provides two ways to create tab stops: the Text Ruler described on Section 2.6.2, and the Tabs dialog box.

Setting tabs in the Tabs dialog box

The Tabs dialog box is a laborious way of setting tabs, but it gives you more options because you can control all aspects of each tab stop manually. Here’s the drill:

1. Choose Format → Text.

   The Text Format dialog box appears.

2. Click Paragraph.

   The Paragraph dialog box makes its entrance.

3. Click Tabs.

   Ta-da! You found the Tabs dialog box (Figure 2-18).

Note

If the Text Ruler is showing (Figure 2-19), you can get to the Tabs dialog box quickly. Just double-click any tab stop in the ruler. The Tabs dialog box opens with the clicked tab preselected.

Figure 2-18. The Tabs dialog box lists all the tab stops set for a field in the list on the right. You can also adjust a tab stop, delete it, or add a new one. Each stop has a Type, Position, and Fill Character. To change the settings for any stop, first select the stop, then edit the settings, and click Set.

To make a new tab stop, simply select the appropriate options as described below, and then click New. A new entry will appear in the list named after the Position you specified. You can create up to 20 tab stops, after which the New button becomes disabled. If you try to add a tab stop at a position where one already exists, the new stop simply replaces the old one.

Editing tab stops in the Tabs dialog box

Once you’ve created tab stops, you can change them anytime using the same Tabs dialog box. Select a Tab stop in the list to see its settings. The Type radio buttons, as well as the Position and Fill Character fields, change to reveal the settings for the selected stop. To change them, modify the values in any way, then click Set. To delete the selected tab stop, click Clear.

Finally, you’ve probably noticed that the Tabs dialog box has an Apply button just like the Paragraph dialog box, and it works the same way. Click Apply, and the tab stops showing in the list will be reflected in the current field. Sometimes it can be tough to position your tab stops in just the right place. Use the Apply button to see how things line up. When you’re satisfied with the tabs, click OK.

Type. A Tab stop’s type effects how text entry behaves when you tab to that particular stop. Figure 2-19 shows how these different tab stops look in action.

• A Left tab causes the next text you type to be anchored to the tab stop on its left side. As you type, the text moves to the right just like normal Left aligned text.

• A Right tab works in the other direction. When you tab to one, everything you type is anchored on the right, like right-aligned text. As you type, the text moves to the left, towards the beginning of the line.

• A Center tab causes the text you type to be centered at the point of the stop. As you type, the text moves in both directions.

• The Align on tab lets you specify any character (letter, number, or punctuation) to act as the point of alignment. For instance, if you specify a period for the alignment character, the period or decimal point you type will anchor to the tab stop. Any text you type before the period will be right aligned and any text after the period will be left aligned. You use this feature most often to line up lists of numbers by their decimal points.

Figure 2-19. You have a lot of flexibility with your tab stops. This field has left, right, decimal-point aligned, and center-aligned tabs.

Position. In addition to a type, every stop has a position, which is measured from the left edge of the field, in the same units used for Indent settings (such as inches and centimeters). For example, if you’re storing a little two-column list in a text field, you might set tab stops at .5 inches and 2 inches.

Fill Character. FileMaker also accepts a fill character for each tab. This character is repeated as many times as necessary to fill the blank space leading up to a tab. Most often you use a period for the fill character (as shown in Figure 2-20), but any character is allowed.

Figure 2-20. When a tab stop has a fill character, FileMaker uses it to fill up the space leading up to the text at the tab stop. A period is by far the most common fill character, as you’ve seen on a many a diner menu or theater program…or the table of contents of this book!

A picture can be in any of more than a dozen formats, including the common kinds like JPEG, GIF, and TIFF, PICT, and BMP. FileMaker will also accept PhotoShop and PostScript (.eps) files. When you put a picture in a container field, the field displays the picture itself.

The following methods for copying, pasting, and inserting pictures into container fields are the same whether you’re inserting a movie, PDF, text, or other type of file. You see the same type of Insert dialog box for navigating your hard drive each time.

The most obvious way to put a picture into a contained field is to paste it in. You can copy a picture from just about anywhere, then click once in the field and choose Edit → Paste (Ctrl+V or ⌘-V).

You can also copy data from the container field. Again, simply click once on the field, and choose Edit → Copy (Ctrl+C or ⌘-C) or Edit → Cut (Ctrl+X or ⌘-X). Whatever was in the field is now ready to paste into another field, record, or program.

QuickTime data includes anything supported by QuickTime Player, the multimedia software from Apple. FileMaker uses QuickTime to help it deal with multimedia files. The file types include QuickTime files (.mov); FLASH animations; video files like AVI, DV, MPEG, and MPEG4; virtual reality files (VR); and music files like WAV, AIFF, MP3, and AAC. Because FileMaker uses QuickTime, and QuickTime is frequently upgraded (www.quicktime.com), the exact list of formats FileMaker supports also changes. For the most part, QuickTime can handle most standard music, video, and animation formats.

When a container field holds a QuickTime file, you normally see the movie’s poster frame, which is usually just the first frame of the movie. When you click the movie, a standard movie controller appears (like the one at the lower-left of Figure 2-21), so you can play, pause, fast-forward, and rewind it. The controller also has a button to adjust the volume and a little knob that shows you where you are in the movie.

Just as with a picture (Section 2.7.2.1), you can copy and paste QuickTime movies or sounds into the container field or use the Insert → QuickTime menu command to select a QuickTime file from the hard drive.

A sound is a recorded bit of audio. FileMaker actually lets you record sounds right into the field. You can keep audio notes with a project record, or record your practice speeches and save them for when you’re famous. When a container field holds a sound, it displays a little speaker icon; double-click it to hear the recorded sound.

Recording sound

The Insert → Sound command doesn’t bring up the same dialog box as the other Insert commands. Instead, it shows the Record dialog box (Figure 2-22). If your computer has a microphone attached, you can record any sound directly into the field.

Figure 2-22. FileMaker records sound from the sound input device you set up in your control panel (Windows) or System Preferences (Mac OS X). Most computers let you use more than just a microphone as the sound input device. For example, you can usually record sound from audio CDs in your CD-ROM drive or DVDs from your DVD drive.

The Record dialog box is simple, but capable. The speaker icon provides feedback about what the microphone’s picking up, by showing little soundwaves indicating the sounds it’s hearing. The more soundwaves you see, the louder the recording. In fact, the speaker icon lets you check for soundwaves even when you’re not recording, so use it to do a quick sound check (“Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3”). If you don’t see waves when you talk, make sure the microphone’s plugged in.

When you’re ready to record, proceed as follows:

1. Click the Record button.

   FileMaker immediately begins recording everything the microphone hears. As it does, the Recording Time progress bar fills slowly. When the progress bar reaches the end, you’ve recorded as much as you have room for.

2. When you’re done recording, click Stop.

   At this point, you have some sound recorded. The length of the recording shows to the right of the Recording Time progress bar.

3. To hear what you got, click Play.

   Once the recording is playing, you can use the Stop or Pause button to stop it. Clicking Stop will stop it completely. (The next time you press Play, it starts over from the beginning.) Pause, on the other hand, lets you stop the playback momentarily. (Clicking Pause or Play again starts the playback right where it left off.)

4. If you’re satisfied with what was recorded, click Save to store the sound in the container field.

   If you click Cancel, FileMaker completely erases the sound you recorded with no warning…so be sure you click the correct button.

Tip

The Insert → Sound command is specifically for recording sound directly into the field. If you have a sound file of some kind already on your hard drive (an MP3 for example), choose Insert → QuickTime instead. In general, if the data you’re putting in the field has a time component (meaning it happens over time, like video or sound), treat it like a QuickTime file.

A container field can also hold a file. Since FileMaker doesn’t know what the file is supposed to be, it simply shows you the file’s name and icon. Unfortunately, you can’t do anything with a file like this while it’s in FileMaker. You can’t edit it. You can’t even open it and view its contents. Rather, the Container field simply holds the file for you. (Soon you’ll learn how to get it back out.)

If you can’t use the file in FileMaker, why put it there at all? Sometimes people need to keep track of lots of files. They might need to organize them in ways that make sense only to their business. Keeping all these files in a folder on your hard drive can be a real drag since they can be slow to search and hard to reorganize. With FileMaker, you can keep the files right alongside other important data. For example, you can store project specifications (in Microsoft Word format) and diagrams (in Visio format) in your database along with tasks, team members, and timelines.

The most common way to place a file into a container field is to use the Insert → File command. On Windows, you can also copy a file on the desktop and paste it into a container field. When you insert a file, FileMaker makes no effort to figure out what’s in the file. If you choose a picture, you’ll still get just the name and icon. If you want to see the picture itself in FileMaker, you must choose Insert → Picture, as described on Section 2.7.2.1.

Before printing out your database or otherwise sharing it with the greater public, you’ll want to make sure your spelling is correct. If you’ve been typing new records at lightning speed, there are bound to be some typos. And nothing screams “amateur” louder than a date field that reads “Febuary 15.” All the spell checking commands are found under the Edit → Spelling menu. Here you have three choices:

No matter how many records you’re checking, FileMaker opens the same Spelling dialog box shown in Figure 2-23 as soon as it stumbles upon a misspelled word. At bottom, the Spelling window says Status: Questionable Spelling. The Word text box displays the word in question. There are a few different ways things can proceed from here:

Figure 2-23. If by the magic of planetary alignment, you have no misspellings when you first run the spell checker, you’ll still see the Spelling window but the status line will say it’s Finished Spelling right away. This behavior is universally disorienting, so don’t feel bad when you spend 10 minutes trying to figure out why nothing looks right before you notice that it’s already finished. You’ll also see that the Replace button now says Done; click it to make the Spelling window go away. In this figure, the spell checker found a typo: “quandrey.”

FileMaker’s spell checker also works automatically as you type. This visual spell check is a per-database setting, so you control it from the File Options dialog box. Choose File → File Options, then click the Spelling tab. You’ll find two options that you can mix and match to help you spell better, run faster, and jump higher. Well, you’ll spell better, anyway.

The first option is “Indicate questionable spellings with special underline.” If you miss your word processor, this one will make you feel right at home. You’ll see that familiar red line underneath any word FileMaker doesn’t like the looks of. Plus, if you right-click (Control-click on the Mac) on the underlined word, FileMaker offers a menu containing suggestions for spelling the word properly.

If red lines aren’t annoying enough, you could turn on “Beep on questionable spellings” and FileMaker will make your computer beep when you type a space after a misspelled word. Unfortunately, it’s just the same old alert beep that your computer makes in all kinds of other situations—so it can be easy to miss. But in combination with the red line, this pair could be a formidable reminder to spell better.

FileMaker comes with spelling dictionaries for various languages and choosing among them is easy. Just choose Edit → Spelling → Select Dictionaries. The Select Dictionaries window lets you choose the language to use for all spell-checking operations. You can see it in Figure 2-24.

Figure 2-24. The Select Dictionaries window lets you pick the spell checker language. You can also opt to use a User Spelling Dictionary (which happens automatically unless you come here and say otherwise). You can actually create as many user dictionaries as you want, and then select the one you want to use for a particular database.