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FileMaker 2026 Released

FileMaker Hacks

A blog by Kevin Frank in Affiliate Blogs

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Entries in this blog

Successfully Find Duplicate Values Within A Set Of Records

The need to isolate duplicates within an existing found set has often been a source of frustration for developers. A couple weeks ago we examined a technique by Ralph Learmont demonstrating that, contrary to popular belief and experience, the ! (find duplicates) operator can, under certain conditions, be coerced into isolating duplicate values within a found […] View the full article

FM 13: Anti-deduping, part 3

Today we have two great examples of using demos from this site as a starting point and making significant improvements: one from Malcolm Fitzgerald in response to FM 13: Anti-deduping, part 1, and one from Ralph Learmont in response to FM 13: Anti-deduping, part 2. As you may recall the challenge was to retain duplicates […] View the full article

Generating Sample Data

Have you ever wanted to generate sample data for one of your solutions that was random in certain ways, but within a defined range or scope? For example, from an existing table of customers… choose 20 at random create between 4 and 8 invoices for each of them dated anywhere between 1 September and 31 […] Source

It’s Sorta a Value List Thing

Editor’s note: Today it’s my privilege to present an informative guest article written by Jonathan Fletcher on the elusive topic of sorted dynamic value lists. Jonathan is a well-regarded, thoughtful and thought-provoking fixture in the FileMaker community, known for his generous and frequent contributions to various online FileMaker forums. Have you ever had a need […] Source

Conditional Tab Panel Access

Challenge: in a system with three privilege sets, Employee, Manager and Administrator, you want to control access to various panels on this tab control like so: As usual in the FileMaker world, there are various approaches you could take, and today we’re going to look at three of them with the help of these three […] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=8576" rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>

Conditional Subsummary Report in Browse Mode

Last time we looked at several summary reporting tricks, including a conditional subsummary (when an item’s Status is “Scheduled” it will have a value in the Substatus field — otherwise Substatus will be blank). The challenge was to generate a summary report showing Substatus only where appropriate, without seeing any annoying empty gray rows beneath […] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=8581" rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>

Summary Reporting Tricks

One of the best ways to learn about a particular FileMaker feature or behavior is to build a demo. You might build one in response to a client request, or to try to answer a question somone has asked, or just to see what happens. At any rate, today we’re going to look at three […] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=8501" rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>

Benford’s Law

A common exercise in freshman courses on statistics and probability is to divide the students into two groups, let’s call them A and B. Each student in group A is instructed to flip a coin 100 times and record the resulting sequence of heads and tails. Each student in group B is instructed to merely […] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=8423" rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>

ForgetSummary()

One of my favorite FileMaker functions is GetSummary; I use it frequently, and it had never occurred to me that there might be any alternative. Recently, however, Mikhail Edoshin pointed out on the FMPExperts list that GetLayoutObjectAttribute can serve as a viable replacement, like so: I threw together a demo file, ForgetSummary, to compare the [...] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=8378" rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>

PDF Catalog with Table of Contents

Recently I was asked by a client whether we could produce a PDF catalog from his company’s database, with products grouped by manufacturer. Me: “Of course, this is FileMaker.” Him: “Can it have a table of contents?” Me: “Yeah, sure, no problem.” Actually, it took some trial and error, but we got there eventually… …and [...] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=8212" rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>

Running Total in Reverse

I got a request the other day to show a running balance in reverse order in a portal, in other words, from oldest at the bottom to newest at the top. Surprisingly, FileMaker does not provide an obvious way to accomplish this. [Demo file: running total in reverse] Running balances, a.k.a. “running totals” are summary [...] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=8207" rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>

Weekly Sales Comparison Charts

If you are responsible for helping business decision makers analyze data, you are probably familiar with questions like: Are we on track to meet or exceed last years sales totals? How is our sales team doing now, compared to this time a year or two ago? Today’s demo file, weekly sales comparison charts, can help [...] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=8145" rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>

Radical Separation, part 4

Disclaimer: This article contains speculative and experimental techniques that are in the proof-of-concept stage. Use at your own risk and test thoroughly. FYI: In March at the Portland PauseOnError un-conference, Matt Navarre and I had a freewheeling Separation Model discussion, a podcast of which has just been posted as episode 85 at FileMaker Talk. Welcome [...] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=8066" rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>

Fast Grid Displays on a WAN

Last October I began a series on Outer Joins, which explored a number of different techniques to display summarized information in a grid, and at the time I concluded that the “fastest” method was to leverage the FileMaker relational model. And it was plenty fast, locally… and not too bad on a LAN… and technically, [...] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=7924">Source</a>

Radical Separation, part 3

Disclaimer: This article contains speculative and experimental techniques that are in the proof-of-concept stage. Use at your own risk and test thoroughly. Today we’re going to delve further into the concept of virtual calculations, picking up where we left off last time, and with the assumption that readers are familiar with the material in part 1 [...] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=7759">Source</a>

Radical Separation, part 2

Disclaimer: This article contains speculative and experimental techniques that are in the proof-of-concept stage. Use at your own risk and test thoroughly. In part 1 of this series, we defined radical separation as a separation model scenario in which the developer no longer has access to a data file once a solution had been deployed. [...] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=7682">Source</a>

Outer Joins in FileMaker 12, part 3

I’ve said before, and no doubt will say again, that one of my favorite things about this blog is how much I learn from your feedback and the demo files you send me. Recently I received a file from Otmar Kramnis of the Hochschule Luzern demonstrating the fastest SQL-based method I have yet seen to [...] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=7624">Source</a>

Radical Separation, part 1

Disclaimer: This article contains speculative and experimental techniques that are in the proof-of-concept stage. Use at your own risk and test thoroughly. Earlier this month I had the honor and the privilege to do a presentation on the topic of Radical Separation at the PauseOnError un-conference in Portland, Oregon, which included a demo file resembling this [...] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=7380">Source</a>

Copying and Pasting Layout Schema

Has this ever happened to you? You have a number of identically named fields in two different tables… …but when you copy one of those fields from a layout based on the first table… … and paste it onto a layout based on the second one… …the result is not what you might have wished [...] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=7353">Source</a>

Fun with Factorials

A while back my youngest son, who is an avid Go player, asked me, “Is it true there are more possible Go games than there are atoms in the universe?” “Absolutely,” I replied, “Let’s fire up FileMaker Pro and prove it.” (I wasn’t about to let a rare teachable moment slip by.) “If memory serves, [...] <a href="http://www.filemakerhacks.com/?p=3756">Source</a>

Privilege Set Reporting

Editor’s note: Today I’m pleased to present a guest article by Michael Rocharde, author of FileMaker & Me, an interactive multimedia book focusing on FileMaker Interface Design. FileMaker has always been an incredible tool for generating reports and for many years, I used to have a report screen with banks of buttons to generate all [...] Source

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