Learning Claris FileMaker

What is it?

The Data Viewer is a feature of FileMaker Advanced that gives you under-the-hood access to your data. You can certainly program in FileMaker Pro and not use FileMaker Advanced, but you will be missing certain—I must say critical—tools that, essentially can make your life a lot easier. We’ve all been there, learning FileMaker, getting excited about putting fields on layouts and seeing our data grow. But learning to use the tools that are at our fingertips is equally exciting.

As a developer, you want to be precise and use the right functions for the right calculation. FileMaker has a lot of functions that can be interpreted in different ways. Additionally, there are functions that sound similar, especially to a new developer.

The Data Viewer can be a great tool to test your pudding before serving it at the dinner table. In this article we’ll take a look at some things you can do with the Data Viewer. You can test your data while debugging a script, you can write and test calculations, and you can even set variables to use later. Data can be sorted by the column headers, if you hover over with your mouse you can expand the data that is in a variable, you can even retype and change the data in your variable and you can double-click on it to see it in its entirety