Learning Claris FileMaker

The FileMaker Platform gives you plenty of options for exporting data out of your app.

You can export files as text or even a separate FileMaker file but in our experience, the most common export format is Excel.

It's pretty easy to export data out of FileMaker into Excel; the tricky part is customizing the headers of the exported data.

Why would you want to customize the headers?

You may want to customize headers so that they're easy for the user to understand or to make them consistent with field names in other systems.

The Lesson of Context

One of the first lessons I learned with FileMaker is that of context! Layouts, reports, calculations, scripts, and so on all act from the perspective of a single Table Occurrence (TO) — the “context” — pulling in data from related tables as needed. Generally, the record set being acted on is the set of records in that context table occurrence or a found subset thereof. There are a few exceptions to this, however, and today we’re going to explore one of those.


Let’s say I work in airplane maintenance, and we have a fleet of 3 aircraft that are required to have maintenance every month. My boss asks me to send her an output in Excel of all the planes, one row per plane, and the most recent date of maintenance for each.

I said to myself that should be really simple.

Read more on the blog post

FileMaker 18 ups its game even more with a whole set of script steps (and a few functions) that allow us to write data to an external file.

This can be done without an export. There’s a lot of potential in this FileMaker write data workflow.

Recently I was asked to implement user-friendly Excel exports on a WAN-based solution