Custom Templates Guide

Customizing your
FileMaker Pro templates
FileMaker
®
Pro software provides a collection of Business, Home, and Education templates to help
you begin using the product. These data-ready templates let you track and manage people, assets,
and products quickly and easily, even if you've never used a database before. The database
templates are beautifully designed, functional, relatively simple, and best of all, can be easily
modified to suit your needs. This document gives you an overview of the FileMaker Pro template
design elements and how you can modify them.
In some cases, customizing means making small changes to the file, such as adding a field or
changing the name of a field. You may also want to create a new file by duplicating a template and
making substantial changes. Both approaches are touched on here.
Let’s start with a look at a typical template layout. Each layout element is labeled with a number.
We’ll go over what each element does.
1.
Name of the file.
2. Buttons.
3.
The most important fields in the record, enlarged for emphasis.
4.
Fields important enough to occur on every layout, above the tabs.
5. Tabs (buttons) that switch to other similar layouts.
6.
Fields specific to each tab.
7.
A calculated field, which doesn’t allow the user to type into it.