ISO FileMaker Magazine

As the number of web sites hosting icon collections has grown over the years, it makes little sense to have your own collection of icons custom created at a costly premium. Typically, you can find pretty much any icon you could ever want to use and in many cases, you can even modify the icon to fit your specific needs if you need a slight variation.

With the release of Creative Commons licensing, a wide array of freely available collections and the easy ability to modify icons, you can quickly create exactly what you need for most any FileMaker app.

In this video, I go over the recently released Elemental FM Icon database and I cover all the details and specifics about my own personal icon workflow. From finding the right icon to getting it into FileMaker quickly, you'll learn all kinds of information about working with SVG icons.

You may be familiar with the routine when you have multiple duplicate records in your database. You end up having to reference multiple sources. Which can be a real pain. Ultimately, you end up needing to decide which record is the master and then merging as much of the data as possible from any of the duplicates.

This is a common scenario with any multi-user database system. Where, anytime you have more than one person working on the same data, you can inevitably end up with duplicates.

There are a few ways to deal with duplicates. The first is to try to prevent them in the first place. While this is certainly possible, there are other times where routine imports come from external sources or you've simply allowed duplicates to be entered into the database.

The question now is, "How do you identify duplicates?" and how do you address the fact that our eyes can trick us when we're looking at data which appears exactly the same - yet it's not. This video will show you how to truly approach duplicates and how to deal with them by giving you full control over defining what determines a duplicate or not.

FileMaker 18 was released on Wed. May 22nd 2019. This video walks through all the new features implemented within the latest version of FileMaker Pro Advanced. Here's a short list of all the new features.

01) Security: Revised Manage Security Area
02) Security: Unsigned Plug-ins
03) Security: File References by Default
04) Data: New Import Dialog
05) Develop: Recursion & While
06) Develop: Script Error Logging
07) Develop: Insert From URL Protocols
08) Develop: FMP urls version specific
09) Design: Shift+Arrow 10x movement
10) Integrate: New Barcode Types
11) Develop: XML File Representations
12) Develop: File IO operations

Is there really any question the PDF file format will be going away any time soon? Personally, I don't think so. And, neither should you. Adobe released their license to the technology in 2008 and it became an open standard for the world to use. Airlines use it for tickets, ticket companies use it for concerts and basically it's the digital equivalent of good old real-world paper for the digital world.

So what does this mean to you and your FileMaker database? Well, if you've got data within your database or you're capturing data in something like Web Direct, then knowing you can merge that data into a form fillable PDF can be invaluable. Especially if you need to put that data into a fixed format - like a PDF!

By running a server side script, and running some freely available software which is super fast an efficient, you can send out contracts, invoices, notices or even event tickets with merged in data from your FileMaker database.

Yes, you can certainly generate a PDF right from within FileMaker using your own data, but there are those situations where replicating an existing PDF just takes too much time. So just merge the data into a form fillable PDF. Plus, it just might be faster than generating it from within FileMaker!