Learning Claris FileMaker

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: off-the-shelf software cannot fit the needs of unique businesses.

Instead, businesses need a custom solution that functions in specific ways tailored to their operations.

However, amongst all the growth and chaos associated with running a business, it is common for business owners to be unable to afford large budgets or years of development time — processes need to be repaired and profitability needs to improve quickly.

Fortunately, there is FileMaker.

FileMaker is the ideal platform for custom built software for these types of companies, as it creates a flexible foundation that’s both secure and completely customizable.

Read more on the blog post ...

Hopefully, you have had time to check out some of the fantastic new features in FileMaker 16.

One of the more useful features, from a development standpoint, is the Layout Objects palette.

This shows you a hierarchy of objects placed on your layout, including fields, portals, buttons, web objects, rules, and shapes.

Upon examination, one thing you might have noticed is that there are lot more objects on your layouts than you might realize.

Place a few fields and buttons in a portal, and you can see it add up very quickly.

While the Layout Objects palette undoubtedly makes managing all of this easier, you may want to minimize the number of objects you are placing on your layout.

Shapes, in particular, create a lot of clutter – especially if you are like me, and you like to use shaded and colorized areas to delineate different parts of your layout.

This is a good technique to help users understand the logical hierarchy of their data by putting it together in chunks, or drawing attention to the more important data points.
 

Take a look at the layout above.

• How many objects do you think have been placed on this layout?
• How many parts are there?

Go ahead, take a look. I’ll wait.