I have done database design for several years, but am new to Filemaker and to your templates (I have fileMakers Pro 8.5 and you free Contact and Clendar templates). I have been able to look at the structure of your tables and their relationships, which has been helpful. But I have not figured out how to look at the data in the tables (your pre-build layouts only show some fields, I want to look at the actual tables themselves to see allthe data stored in them). The "View as Table" option under the veiw menu does not seem to be actaive in either the free Contact or Calendar templates.

Thanks,

Mark

bixmark wrote:The "View as Table" option under the veiw menu does not seem to be actaive in either the free Contact or Calendar templates.

Right. For any layout in FileMaker Pro you can select which views are appropriate. For instance, on the Contacts layout in our free Contacts file, we've said that only Form view is appropriate. One reason for this is that table view shows all the fields on a layout and many of the "fields" on our contact layout contain interface objects or buttons, so a table view of that layout would be pretty unwieldy.

We have provided a table view of this data however: if you click on one of the two "grid" icons to the right of the About tab you'll see that one takes you to table view and the other to list view.

If you want table views of other tables like "Filter" or "Interface" you'd need to make a new layout for these tables and then set the "Views" options to permit table view. You can find this option in the Layout / Layout Setup menu while in layout mode. You can also use this to change the views option for any existing layout.

One thing we use our table views for is for exporting to Excel. Since this option sends all the fields on the layout, we've constructed our table views to have no extraneous fields (interface, buttons, etc.) on them, just the data. In the Pro versions of our templates we use these table views as the targets of our RSS or iCal subscription for the same reason.

Hope that helps.