ISO FileMaker Magazine

Because it's so easy to start a database within FileMaker, it's way to easy to gloss over the power features underneath the surface.

I would imagine some developers may never even touch the OnObjectKeystroke and OnLayoutKeystroke events and still make use of a great FileMaker database.

The trick to taking advantage of some of these power features is making them easy to implement.

Who remembers what all the numeric values are for the myriad of Get () functions? You may often have to look things up and this takes time.

On the other hand, having just a few helpful custom functions can make it MUCH more enjoyable to add in new, and useful, features.

This video will help you get started with, or enhance, your use of the above mentioned trigger events.

Spell checking seems like one of those subtle little afterthoughts. You either know you need it or it almost doesn't exist. But, of course, it's always there. This isn't how it used to be. It used to be that you had to check everything manually if you wanted to catch those typos.

With the OS picking up a bunch of the work in the last decade, pretty much any application can simply show which words are misspelled. This is the familiar red-dotted, or some other color, underline we now see when a word is misspelled.

While this particular feature, in FileMaker, can be turned on or off at both the field level and the file level, it doesn't cover all the new words and terms which inevitably show up as we move forward through time.

If you have any type of need which may benefit from the custom dictionary then watching this video will help provide some insight into making things work much more smoothly. At least when it comes to spell checking the content in your database fields.

With our work lives becoming a bit more distributed, this particular technique may be quite helpful to those with industry heavy specific jargon!

What's the easiest way to display images within your FileMaker solution?

Did you answer with a container field? Sure!

Now, did you answer with the "same" container field which stores the image?

Maybe not.

In fact, probably not. The right answer, however, in most all situations is typically "it depends", but we're going to walk through the knowledge necessary to optimize your database for the best performance when it comes to image display.

You often find tradeoffs when it comes to storing and displaying data. You either store once and render in multiple sizes or you store multiple sizes and render once.

The key is knowing what's going on behind the scenes. Knowing what's being transferred and when and how FileMaker provides support for this in order to make your database as efficient as possible!