User manual

Table Of Contents
Chapter 3 | Designing and creating solutions 45
Keep the following points in mind:
1 Any field type except summary can store a global value. For more information, see “About
indexing and storage options” on page 52.
1 Be sure to use a date field (instead of a text or number field) to store dates. To avoid confusion
when using dates, always use four-digit years.
1 Use text fields instead of number fields to store postal codes, phone numbers, and other values
with leading zeroes or characters like hyphens or parentheses.
1 Although you can’t find or sort records based on a container field, you can define a text field to
describe or identify the contents of the container. Then, you can find or sort records based on
the data in that text field.
To change the way data is displayed in text, number, date, time, and timestamp fields, see
“Formatting field data on a layout” on page 76.
Summary fields produce results
from values in multiple records
Salesperson Item Qty Extended Price
David Michaels FB3 1 $3.95
David Michaels FB4 1 $17.50
David Michaels FB1 2 $19.90
David Michaels FB5 3 $52.50
Total $93.85
Sophie Tang FB6 2 $39.00
Sophie Tang FB7 5 $77.50
Sophie Tang FB2 2 $45.00
Total $161.50
Grand Total $255.35
Sales Report
Calculation fields produce results from values in
the current record or related records
Favorite Bakery Confidential June 2014