A sub-summary report, is a special kind of report where records are grouped together by a specified field known as the "break" field (because it acts as a break between groups of similar records). Normally, the break between parts happens above your records, but there is a way in which to have the break "appear" to be beside your records instead…

The count function allows you to produce a count of the number of records through a relationship. However what may be less clear is that in order to achieve this, every record must be downloaded to the client computer, making the process very slow over a wide area connection. There is, however, an alternative to count in this situation which is almost instantaneous, this article explains how...

There are four main areas of your database where you can use special separator lines to help keep information organised, these are Scripts, Layouts, Value Lists & Custom Menus. This article will go through each and explain how to use them, and why they are a good idea to use.

The Let function is one of the most brilliant and underrated functions in FileMaker, and I think it should be used whenever and wherever possible. This article will give an introduction to the function, some possible scenarios when it should be used, and give an example as to it's use.

Building layouts in FileMaker can involve adding a number of various elements such as fields, buttons, portals, tab controls, and graphics such as jpg and png images. It is the use of images on layouts that this article is all about.

This is a simple technique that I use all the time and find works very reliably. It involves having a script create a new window into which the script executes it's necessary steps, before closing it when done.

You may have noticed a lack of article postings over the last couple of months, and fewer articles overall this year. Please don't panic for it has not been through laziness or lack of content. Instead, I have been somewhat pre-occupied with other things that I would like to share with you now?

Conditional Value lists may be the most asked about piece of functionality on the FileMaker Cafe. To try and provide a thorough and easy to follow explanation of what they are and how they work, I decided to write an article on the subject and build a small example file to help illustrate the technique…

One of the cool things that conditional formatting has allowed us to do ever since its introduction in FileMaker 9 is to build inline field labels that become hidden when the field contains text. With the introduction of field state formatting in FileMaker 12, we can take these inline labels even further and make them even more awesome?

A grey fill on the active portal row. For years it has been something that simply 'was'. Well no longer. In FileMaker 13 we can finally easily eliminate this rather annoying design feature, and take back full control of portal fill colours.