From the course: FileMaker Pro Essential Training (2019)

Essential preferences - FileMaker Pro Tutorial

From the course: FileMaker Pro Essential Training (2019)

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Essential preferences

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- [Cris] Now the very first time you ever launch FileMaker, it's probably a good idea to get familiar with some of the different preferences that are available to you. You really only have to pay attention to these maybe the very first time. Every other time after that, the preferences will already be saved. Now the way that you get to preferences in FileMaker, is either under the FileMaker Pro Advanced menu in FileMaker for Mac or if you're using FileMaker Pro Advanced for Windows, you can find it at the bottom of the edit menu. In this case, I'm recording on a Mac, so I'll go to FileMaker Pro Advanced, and choose preferences. You'll see five different tabs here. I'm really just going to go through a couple of these settings to show you some of the ones that you're probably going to use more often and then we'll skip over some of the ones that you may not use at all. Now, in the general section, there's really three things I want to point out to you. First of all, under the user interface options, you'll see show recently opened files. By default, this will allow you to show up to 10 different recent files, inside of your recents section in the creates window and also under your file menu. You'll notice under here that you've got recents and you can see I've got three of them showing. Now if you want to show fewer recently opened files or maybe none, you can come in here and uncheck it for none and change that number to fewer if you want if you want to see less of them. Next section down here, user name, you'll see has an option for system, which is the default setting, and under my case it says Cris Ippollite and what that means is that is just adopted the account name of whatever machine FileMaker was installed on. In this case, I have a user account called Cris Ippollite on this Mac, and it adopted that name. Now this might be something that you just leave and you ignore, but one of the things that's interesting about this is whatever the option is that's selected under user name in this installation of FileMaker Pro Advanced, is what's going to show up in the account name when a user is logging in using an account name and a password to your application. For you, let's say you often use the admin account, you might want to then save yourself a little bit of typing by going under user name, selecting other, and choosing admin. I do that quite a bit myself. Or you can also use this, if you've got several different workstations, each with their own installation of FileMaker, and you want to know which workstation was used when let's say a record was created or modified. In that case, you would go in here and you can say workstation one on the first installation, go into the next machine and do it workstation two, and so on. The idea here is that you can extract something called user name inside the programming environment, using either calculations or scripts that use calculations, and this way you can actually tell which different installation it is. But really, it's probably best used for helping you put in what the account name default value is going to be. Sometimes it might be confusing, honestly. And finally, down on the bottom, the most important one, use advanced tools. Now this one is kind of hidden, but if you don't have this one selected, you might be missing out on all the really great features that you have available to you in FileMaker Pro Advanced. A few versions ago, FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced were two different products. Now, FileMaker Pro Advanced is one product, but you have to turn on use advanced tools. If you turn on use advanced tools, you get all sorts of extra functionality for no additional cost. For example, you'll have access to developer utilities, something called the database design report, a script debugger, data viewer, you can manage custom menus, custom functions, and you can even copy field schema, like tables or import tables from one file to another, and you can even copy and paste layout themes. So all of this seems like a really good reason to have that selection chosen and this is how you do it. Go into this, select advanced tools, and you'll notice that it says FileMaker Pro Advanced restart is required. So you'll do that very thing. Quit FileMaker Pro Advanced and now you'll open FileMaker Pro Advanced back up. Now that we've restarted FileMaker, the one big change we'll notice is that we have a tools menu and this is where some of that functionality that I was talking about can be found. For example, you have a script debugger, some controls for the debugger, something called the data viewer, and both of those come into play when you're troubleshooting scripts. You can find more information on that in other courses here on FileMaker. The ability to manage custom menus and even some developer utilities. So all of that functionality is already built in to your application, all you have to do is go turn it on inside of your preferences, using the use advanced tools option. So like most applications, the preferences in FileMaker can just be reviewed the first time you're using your application and you can kind of set it and forget it from there.

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