Archive | February, 2012

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 2

Posted on February 25, 2012 by

[Note: To avoid a huge amount of redundant repetition, this article assumes that you are familiar with part 1 and part 1.1 in this series.]

Today we’re going to take a look at streamlining the approach introduced in part 1 by reducing clutter on the Relationships Graph, going from this…

…to this, with no loss in functionality.

…and you can follow along in today’s demo file, excel exports, part 2, if you are so inclined. Continue Reading →

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 1.1

Posted on February 20, 2012 by

Bruce Robertson emailed me off list with an improved version of my demo from part 1, excel exports, part 1.1, which I am sharing with his permission. The improvements are…

a) live preview fields showing the data to be exported.

b) an “Eval Error Tester” script to make sure the output code in the alias table is well-formed.

Thank you Bruce for making this available.

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 1

Posted on February 20, 2012 by

Many end users appreciate FileMaker’s ability to export a found set of records in Excel format — it’s fast, straight-forward and empowering. One request that I have received from clients multiple times over the years is: make the exported field names in the top row of the spreadsheet “human-friendly”…

For example, instead of this:

…perhaps they would rather see this:

Another request has been to allow data from multiple source fields to be combined into single export columns, as per columns A and C here:

And a third request has been to provide an interface so that users can pick and choose fields to export, including (where appropriate) related fields, without having to navigate the complexity of the native FileMaker export dialog. Continue Reading →

Google Route Mapping, part 2

Posted on February 15, 2012 by

Those of you who attended DevCon 2011 in San Diego may recall meeting Andries Heylen of BH&A, who cheerfully answered questions in the FileMaker Visionary Bar. Well, from the sow’s ear demo I posted in part 1, Andries has woven a silk purse (google-route-mapping-part-2), which I am sharing with his permission, and which uses Google “waypoints” to produce an optimized travel route.

Continue Reading →

Google Route Mapping, part 1

Posted on February 4, 2012 by

The other day someone asked a question on the FMP Experts list about plotting a driving route in Google Maps using FileMaker data.

Mark Rubenstein posted a simple solution, and my reactions were, in this order: “No way, it can’t possibly be this easy; I should build a demo (google-route-mapping) to find out; wow, it really works… hey, I wonder if he’d be okay with me posting this on FileMaker Hacks?” Continue Reading →