From the course: FileMaker Pro Essential Training (2019)

Touring the Create window - FileMaker Pro Tutorial

From the course: FileMaker Pro Essential Training (2019)

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Touring the Create window

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- [Instructor] FileMaker Pro Advanced, FileMaker Go, and FileMaker Web Direct all include a way to visually organize all of your FileMaker apps to instantly find what you're looking for. This is what's called the create window. Now, if you've just opened up FileMaker for the first time, you're probably already looking at the create window, but if not, I'm going to show you a couple of different ways that you can get there. First, under the File menu, if you choose Create New, that'll take you right to the create window, or also under Recent, you'll see Show Recent, and Favorites, you'll see Show Favorites, any of those will get you to the create window, which is what we're looking at here. Now, in this window, you'll see that we have four different sections in the sidebar on the left, My Apps, Favorites, Recent, and Create. Now, My Apps might look a little bit different to you if you have just recently upgraded from FileMaker version 17, and that's because in 17, My Apps was where you would your favorites, but now you see we have a favorites section. So what is My Apps? Well, My Apps is you will access any apps that are hosted on FileMaker Cloud. For more information, you can go look up FileMaker Cloud and see what some of those options are that are available to you, and when you upload your apps to FileMaker Cloud, you'll be given a FileMaker ID that will allow you to access the different Cloud hosted apps. So for now, let's focus on Favorites. So Favorites, of course, is where you'll find your most commonly used apps. Now if you don't see app icons in this window, that means you don't have any favorites, of course you might've added some of your own, so your screen might look a little bit different than mine, but the easy way to add favorites, again, the ones that you're going to use the most often, are by clicking on the Add App, and you can say From Browse which allows you to navigate to a different custom app somewhere on your desktop or on a network drive, and it saves the reference to that application here in the window, but let's say you want to save a reference to a hosted file, you would hit Add App, hit From Hosts, at which point you could click on Local, and if your machine is on the same network as a active version of FileMaker Server, then you'll be able to see that server here, if not, you can add a server by clicking this plus sign up here, and really the only thing that's required is you enter in the internet address. Internet address is really just the IP address of your dedicated FileMaker Server, or sometimes instead of an IP address, it's a domain, so it might be something like host.yourcompany.com or something like that, and to make it easy, you can put in the host name, that's just what it's going to show up as inside your Favorites window, and if you want to remove something, simply right-click on it and choose Remove. So going down to Recents, it'll simply show all the files that you've recently opened up. Now, the number of files that show up are actually controlled under the Preferences, you'll see here under Preferences, in General, show recently opened files, which is the second one. The default is set to show recently opened files, if that's not checked, you won't see anything in Recents, but you can also manage what number of files. So you see by default we've got 10, you can have that lower if you'd like to, for example, or you can just leave it at your default of 10, and one of the ways that you can actually get a recent file saved into your Favorites is by right-clicking on it in this list, and choosing Add to Favorites, or you could choose to Remove it if you'd like to. Let's choose Add to Favorites, we'll navigate you over to the Favorites section and show your new file displayed there, and all the way on the bottom, we see we have the Create tab. I'ma discuss the Starter and Sample apps that you see here in a later movie, and I'll just focus really on what else you can do here. You can open up and start a brand new custom app by choosing Blank, or you can click on Convert which allows you to convert data from Excel, or Text, or any other kind of file format into a FileMaker Pro Advanced file, and one of the things you'll notice is that when I choose these apps, either in Favorites or in Recents, you'll see that they got an app icon associated with it, you may not know that you have control over that. For example, if I dismiss this window and I go under the File menu to File Options, you'll see the second tab here called Icon, you'll see that FileMaker ships with 30 different icons that you can choose from, maybe one of these is appropriate to the application that you're creating, and you can just choose that one. Once you select one of those, that app icon will show up in any of the create windows, again, that's FileMaker Pro Advanced, FileMaker Go, or FileMaker Web Direct. Let's say though, that you might have your own custom icon, for example here, I've got this icon that's 288 by 288 in size, it's also a png, that's one of the different options that you have available to you, you can either do png or jpeg, and really, optimally they should be 288 by 288 pixels. Now when I choose this, what'll happen is FileMaker will us this as my custom app icon. And so now, when I go into Favorites for example, I'll see that that custom icon is there instead of the default FileMaker icon. Now, this will not have any effect on how the app is displayed on your desktop. Now, the custom app icon will not have any control over how the app looks on your desktop, but everywhere else that you're going to see it, again, in any kind of create window on FileMaker Go, FileMaker Pro Advanced, or FileMaker Web Direct, you will see your custom icon. So the create window allows you to launch all of your custom apps from one convenient window, it's easy to navigate from the Recents tab to find recently opened files, or even some of your favorites, or if you want to get started, all the different ways that you can get started creating a new custom app are all available to you here in the create window.

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