FILEMAKER: FileMaker 11 Report Assistant Changes

From Dwayne Wright PMP
Certified FileMaker 10, 9 & 8 Developer
WEB: www.dwaynewright.com
EMAIL: info@dwaynewright.com
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From what I can tell, the FileMaker Report Assistant has been upgraded with the following changes and I’m listing these in (what I determine) their order of importance. This isn’t the order in which they appear in the assistant workflow.

- Run Script Automatically Checkbox
- Specify Summary Fields On The Fly
- Updated Preview Area
- New Manage Layouts Dialog (different way to start reports)

RUN SCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY
This innocent looking checkbox in the last pane of the assistant is quite handy. What it will do is tag the layout automatically with the OnLayoutEnter script trigger to run the script you created for the report!

SPECIFY SUMMARY FIELDS ON THE FLY
It used to be that if you were using the report assistant and you realized that you needed to create a summary field (for subsummary or grand totals), you had to quit out of the assistant. This is no longer the case because you can now create new fields on the fly.

UPDATED PREVIEW AREA
When you are choosing options for your reports, a preview of what the report may look like appears off to the right hand side. List and columnar options are on the same choice screen and that is a nice tweak.

The new report assistant preview.

The previous report preview examples.

NEW MANAGE LAYOUTS DIALOG
This is another way to start a layout and a new layout can be a report. So this is a pretty subtle change.

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