Often, I’ll find myself importing records from some other source and then needing to create a few new fields to store information while I do some data cleanup. Whereas once I found myself exporting data out to spreadsheets to do ad hoc reporting, that’s far less necessary with FileMaker 11. While there are still many reports that need to be built in Layout mode with dedicated layouts and scripts, table view is now the first place I go to analyze data. Now, in FileMaker 11, I’ll say it: table view is awesome! If you haven’t explored all you can do in table view, well… you should.

But it wasn’t quite there… not without the ability to also summarize data. Table view provided a useful tool for allowing all users to create their own reports. All of a sudden, you could choose to show or hide fields depending on your current needs with the Modify button, without needing to switch over to Layout mode and make actual changes to the layout. About the only thing table view had going for it was resizable columns.īut FileMaker Pro 10 made me start to think differently.

Formatting was easier to control, you didn’t have to take extra steps to ensure the header and footer would appear, and if, like me, you tend to give your fields arcane “database-y” names like ct_nameFull_lfm instead of Full Name, you didn’t have to worry about those names appearing in the column headers. List view seemed to have so much more to offer. I’ll admit it: prior to FileMaker Pro 10, I didn’t give much thought to providing users with the ability to view a layout as a table as opposed to a list.

Filemaker pro 16 grouped button