i am at work and we dont have fm so i cant read the help. i haven't looked into these. what do they do?

That's a seriously loaded question. At its most essential, a portal is a gui method for viewing information related to the current record or file. A simple example would be in a projects table, using a portal to view summary data for all invoices in an invoices table related to the currently selected project. When you go to another record, different related data is displayed.

It's the same concept as displaying related fields on a layout, but is most useful when there is a one-to-many relationship from the current file to itself or another file. Portals can be used to filter data and perform some nifty tricks, as well.