Quick Start

Table Of Contents

Getting Started Guide

View as Table

FileMaker Pro has always offered two ways to view your layouts:

View as Form, which displays one record on the screen at a time, and

View as List, which displays more than one record at a time.

FileMaker Pro 5 now adds a third method of viewing your data

onscreen: View as Table. With View as Table, data is displayed in a

grid-like arrangement, similar in appearance to a spreadsheet, with

each row displaying a record and each column displaying a field.

Columns can easily be resized by dragging an edge of a column’s

heading, sorted by clicking on a column’s heading (if enabled), and

reordered by dragging a column to a new position.

Improvements to value lists

Value lists have been improved in FileMaker Pro 5, too.

There are three major improvements to value lists:

1 You can now base a list of values on a relationship. This can yield

a subset of a field’s values, rather than the field’s entire contents. The

value list will display only values from records that are consistent

with the criteria defined in the list’s underlying relationship.

1 When you are deriving values from one field, but displaying

another field’s contents, you can now choose whether to sort on the

first field (the one whose values are being stored) or the second one

(the field whose values are just being displayed).

1 It is now possible to specify a value list that is defined in another

FileMaker Pro 5 database. This allows you to reduce the repetition of

custom or field-based value lists by reusing one central list in

multiple files, and to use value lists in portals (where it’s necessary

to use a value list that must exist in the related file).

Note The external value list (using related values) must be in the

same file as the related field in the portal.

The example below shows a value list based on a relationship. The

same field is displaying a different list of values because the value in

the match field, Category, has changed.

Value list based on key field value “Accessory”

Value list based on key field value “Clothing”