For a long time I was a bit of a doubting Thomas when it came to the online accounting package cleverly named “Xero”. I thought it was a good idea and was pretty impressed by what the NZ company based in Wellington were undertaking. But I guess I thought the product was still too immature to cover the full gambit of functionality required to replace our incumbent system (MoneyWorks) and be a useful business tool

In this article the term "self-aware window" refers to a FileMaker window that can know in real-time whether or not it is the currently selected window, and act accordingly. We introduce a technique for allowing windows to know this, and some examples of what windows could do with that knowledge…

In this article I demonstrate how you can use image maps with web viewers in FileMaker. In doing so, you can display images that, when clicked, can report the coordinate chosen back to FileMaker to handle in whichever manner you wish…

Using an auto-enter calculation on a field is a great way to populate its contents when other fields are modified, including itself. But what do you do if you want to use a calculation that references itself without having it trigger its own auto-enter calculation? The answer lies in thinking outside the calculation...

In applications such as Mail, you may notice that window names can be dynamic, dependent upon the contents of a field. In the case of Mail, the subject dictates the window name. In this article I'll demonstrate a way this can be replicated for FileMaker, and more importantly, how these dynamic windows can easily be selected again once created…

If you have spent any time developing in FileMaker, or programming in almost any language, you will be familiar with the concept of a loop. When scripting your loops you probably have a favorite method that you use. This article presents and compares a number of looping techniques that can be used in FileMaker in an attempt to locate the fastest method...

One of the shortcomings of FileMaker is its inability achieve easy cross-tabular reports and data entry in a normalized structure. There are various techniques to replicate cross-tabular interfaces, but they often involve many relationships for either the columns/rows, or are for display only. The goal of this article is to present a lightweight method for cross-tabular data entry using as few relationships & fields as possible...

When FileMaker 11 was released, one of the lesser documented changes in behavior concerned the defining of menu names when dealing with Custom Menus. When any menu element has an empty name, an interesting thing happens...

Pretty much everything in FileMaker comes with some form of comment box to let you add more information - such as fields, menus, custom functions, calculations, scripts, and the graph. However the one area lacking in a comment box is value lists, unless that is, you think a little outside of the box…