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The first time you launch FileMaker, it's probably a good idea to get familiar
with the different preferences that are available to you. You can open up your
Preferences under the FileMaker Pro menu if you're a Mac user, or if you're a
Windows user, you'll find it at the bottom of your Edit menu.
So opening up the Preferences, you'll see that you have five different tabs,
the General, Layout, Memory, Plug-Ins, and Fonts. And I'll just be touching on
just a couple of the important preferences here for you.
So first you see the General tab and all the options here are selected as
defaults and you can toggle these if you would like. One that you might want to
turn off would be the Show FileMaker Quick Start Screen. It's a good idea to
show the Quick Start Screen the first couple of times that you open up the
application, and then it's up to you whether or not you want to show recently
opened files, but it can be pretty handy to open up files that either are
hosted on the server somewhere and not has to dig around for those.
The other thing and this is really kind of specific to Mac users is the User
Name. This is the user name that FileMaker uses to identify who you are, and
we'll talk about that in later movies. But there also is the information that's
put into the User Name field when you have to log in to a FileMaker database.
So by default, it puts whatever your name is or the system name, but a good
idea is to change that. You can choose other and type in Admin, as we'll talk
about in the Security chapter. That is one of the default accounts in each one
of the FileMaker files. So just a little tip to select the other option, type
in Admin. Keep in mind though for the Windows users that you don't have the
ability to do that. Then on Layouts, you'll notice that there
is only one that's selected and that's Add newly defined fields to the current
layout. What that means is when you define a field in your Manage Fields dialog
window, it's going to automatically appear on the layout that you
currently have on screen. It's probably a good idea when you're in the middle
of creating new files, but if you're just maintaining files, you probably
want to turn this option off. Memory, you can leave everything as a default.
This is an area that you'll probably never have to touch. Plug- Ins, you'll
see that there is just one default plug-in installed and that's AutoUpdate.
That will actually allow FileMaker server to push out plug-in updates
to your application, but a plug-in is something that a third-party manufacturer
creates, and it's something that you would install and then you would get some
instructions on how to configure those plug-ins from that manufacturer.
Under Fonts, you can specify the default font. And if you use any international
fonts, this is where you can manage those as well. So like with many other
applications, preferences are something you probably want to check out the
first couple of times you open up the application and then you can really leave
them set as you start to work with the databases themselves.