Archive | March, 2012

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 5

Posted on March 30, 2012 by

Well, we’ve reached what may well be the final posting in this extended series of articles. We’ve covered a lot of ground, and this article assumes familiarity with what has come before (in parts 1, 1.1, 2, 3 and 4).

Today we’re going to look at a couple “Virtual List” implementations of the User-Friendly Excel Export technique, which will, among other things, allow us to eliminate these calculated fields from the Contacts table…

…as well as the corresponding set of fields in Donations.

Bruce Robertson’s Virtual List technique has made a couple previous appearances on FileMaker Hacks…

…so I won’t rehash its merits in detail here, but if you aren’t familiar with it, I recommend you check out one or both of these earlier articles. Continue Reading →

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 4

Posted on March 19, 2012 by

Colleagues and family members are starting to express concern at my obsessive refusal to bring this series to a close. But we’re getting close. Really. In fact, today, we’re going to look at two cool tricks (and one work around) which are utilized in this article’s demo file, excel exports, part 4, but that could prove useful in a variety of other situations. They are:

  1. Dwindling Value Lists
  2. Using a variable rather than a hard-coded file reference as an import source
  3. Adapting the translation table technique to work with Anchor/Buoy (or any other multiple-table-occurrence-group design philosophy)

Dwindling Value Lists

I’m just going to touch briefly on these today because they are fully deserving of their own topic, but the technique is ideally suited to the task at hand. We want the user to be able to flexibly pick “fields” (actually pseudo-fields, as per earlier articles in this series) to be exported, assigning them to columns A, B, C, etc.

Once a field has been assigned to a particular column, we really don’t need or want to see it in the list of choices any more, do we? Ideally the value list should “dwindle” (shrink) as items are chosen, to make things clearer for the user. (You will note that in the above screen shot, the items in columns A through E, having already been assigned, do not appear in the pop-up menu.)

Continue Reading →

User-Friendly Excel Exports, part 3

Posted on March 8, 2012 by

So far in this series we’ve been looking at exporting data to Excel from a single table (Contacts). Today we’re going to extend the technique to encompass a second related table, Donations, and without too much trouble we can leverage existing work from earlier entries in this series (part 1, part 1.1 and part 2).

To avoid unnecessary repetition, this article assumes familiarity with the aforementioned predecessors, and you can follow along in today’s accompanying demo file, excel exports, part 3, if you are so inclined.

Continue Reading →